


SASO BR7 Dump

by stephanericher



Series: SASO 17 [24]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: F/F, F/M, Foursome - M/M/M/M, Gen, M/M, Other, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-03-02 06:32:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 119
Words: 51,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13312461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: all the sfw knb stuff i wrote for SASO BR7





	1. taigalex, french fries

The Bulls don’t come to LA until the end of February Taiga’s first season, after the all star break (which he’d ended up spending nearly all of in Florida), and he almost cries it’s so good to be home. He takes a left, excusing himself from the team (there’s one other guy who had been traded from the Lakers early in the season, catching sight of his wife and teenage son and launching off). He’d texted Alex when he was going to get in, and then—there—he sees her. She hasn’t seen him yet, peering around, and they've talked and she’d come out to visit before but Taiga suddenly feels a longing, like the longing to be back here (like the beginning of the season, like when he’d first gotten to Tokyo) only different.  
  
She drives him to three different In-n-outs, anticipating what he wants before he asks, running down the gas in her car and filling it up at a crowded station but hearing people shout at each other, seeing traffic as a mass of inching cars, feels so fucking good, and he almost cries again as he shoves animal style fries into his mouth.   
  
“You want a shake?” says Alex.  
  
Taiga nods, and she takes him to a fourth In-n-out. This time, she pulls over to parallel park on the street and they eat together, passing the neapolitan shake back and forth between sips of the Sprite they have left over from the visit before. This time, Taiga realizes he just might be a little bit in love with Alex, as impossible as it is, as long as they’ve known each other and as much as she’s been like a much-older sister, the fact that he’s nineteen and she’s in her mid-thirties right now, that she’s bought him thousands of dollars worth of fast food over the years, probably, and he’s the one making the money now but has yet to really return the favor.  
  
“Next time, my treat,” Taiga says.  
  
“I’ll hold you to that,” says Alex.  
  
*  
  
It comes and goes; Taiga’s convinced he doesn’t love Alex like that, that it’s just a blur of emotions, homesickness and being pitched forward into adulthood, but it’s not, really. It’s like he’s bridged across a barrier, because Alex had once played pro ball, too, a different league in different circumstances, but the long logged miles are the same and the ache and exhaustion are the same and the homesickness is the same, too. It's been building up for years where he couldn’t see it, and only now is it becoming visible, real, a volcano lurking below the ground and bursting forth.   
  
It’s still five years before they’re sitting in the parking lot of a Red Robin, having found the bottom of bottomless steak fries (even considering all the burgers they’d ordered) and strawberry lemonade, neither of them really ready to start driving, when Taiga leans over to kiss Alex, short and simple and clear. Not overdue, but he’s been waiting.   
  
“I’ll take you out for dessert,” Taiga says.   
  
“Get me ice cream,” says Alex, her fingers twining in Taiga's on the console.


	2. nijihimu, wet bangs

It doesn’t rain very often in Los Angeles, but it rains buckets all through their first summer together in New York (technically, not their first summer, but the first summer that they’re officially back together together, and Shuu’s moved into Tatsuya’s place). It’s like every day through June, half of July and most of August they’ll wake up to a grey sky and pouring rain, or a drizzle and a fog that only burns off late in the day. Sometimes it’s a welcome relief from the humidity; other times it’s just as much of a signifier of an incoming heat wave, the temperature climbing like a cinematic ape up a skyscraper downtown.   
  
They get caught in it without umbrellas, because even after a year or two of being here on and off they still don’t carry them, and, well, it might work to their advantage. Like how everyone deserts the streets, crowding under awnings and bus shelters and into the stores and subway stations, or pulling out umbrellas and anoraks that can’t be pleasant in this heat. The rain splatters down on them, soaking them through; Tatsuya barely has time to spare his phone much of a thought before he realizes there’s nothing he can do about it, and he can always afford another one anyway. He catches sight of his face reflected in a floor-to-ceiling window; he looks the same as he always does wet, bangs sticking to his forehead and, well, he does look nice like this. Something someone had said to him once about not being conceited if it’s true, and Tatsuya will admit (to some degree) that he’s a little bit vain. He turns to look at Shuu; the rain is kind to him, too, Water making his shirt stick to his chest, cold enough so that his nipples are poking through. Tatsuya drags his gaze back up to Shuu’s eyes, waiting for the snappy remark that never comes.  
  
Shuu’s looking at him, awestruck, like he’d set the world on fire, like the first time they’d met reflected a million times over, an infinite set of mirrors or the facets on a molecule that he’d barely paid attention to in college chemistry. He’s looking straight at Tatsuya’s face, and Tatsuya feels like the water saturating his hair is about to evaporate, curl into steam, that the humidity that’s been slightly relieved is all going to come back.   
  
And then Shuu kisses him, in the middle of the sidewalk blocking anyone who would pass, except there’s no one. There’s no one on the other side of the window, only cars honking their horns as they go up the side street, too focused on narrowly avoiding running down pedestrians, and then Tatsuya’s not even thinking about any of that, his mind blanking out in the feeling of Shuu’s hand on the side of his face, Shuu’s wet nose against his, Shuu’s mouth, washed clean.


	3. nijihimu, offer

“You can tell me if you change your mind,” says Shuu, brushing his lips over Tatsuya’s. “Anytime.”  
  
“I want to keep this separate for now,” Tatsuya says, and takes a step back. “But thank you.”  
  
He’d passed control over to Tatsuya; that’s the way Tatsuya likes things, generally, but not when it’s something like this, not when he has to deny and lie like this. Tatsuya tells a lot of half-truths and untruths, but he doesn’t like to, not like this. Just because he’s good at it doesn’t make it easy, even in the moment. He doesn’t want to keep this separate; he wants to let it all spill over the sides; when’s he going to get another chance like this? (Anytime, Shuu had said, but that means’s it’s better to let Shuu’s feelings wane like the moon—the moon comes back, but this won’t, not until Tatsuya’s gone, not that that’s a sure thing, but it’s close enough to it.)  
  
Tatsuya’s the one who has to say it, and Shuu should know him well enough to know he won’t. Maybe a diplomatic solution, but the larger part of Tatsuya says it’s vain hope, the idea that maybe Tatsuya will be in it for real, that Tatsuya will escape his screwed-up insides and then, what? Every time Tatsuya tries to get close enough to Shuu to show him that this isn’t what he wants, Shuu refuses to see it. It’s like he looks at it and it’s not in his visible spectrum, stares straight at it and somehow.   
  
(Don’t throw it away, don’t fuck it up, you’ll be gone in a few months, call him your boyfriend. You’re going to let him in too much; don’t let him in, keep pushing back firmly; it’s only for a few more months.)  
  
He doesn’t say it when he clings onto Shuu a little bit too long, that he wants it. When he gets up in the middle of the night to leave, he takes an extra second, an extra minute, an extra five until he’s been staring into space and the clock’s moved too much and Shuu is still asleep beside him. He knows where the spare key is, always locks the door behind him and sticks it back under the mat, tucked into the lining. He doesn’t say it, and then Shuu wakes up and blinks at him in the half-light.  
  
“I meant that, you know,” he says, sitting up to look Tatsuya square in the face. “The offer’s still open.”  
  
It’s like somehow he always knows, even when he doesn’t know, even when he doesn’t see. Like he’s the ocean waves tirelessly wearing down Tatsuya’s stone defense. This time, Tatsuya nods and lets Shuu pull him back down, lets himself settle down into Shuu’s arms. He falls asleep much sooner than he expects to.


	4. nijihimu, apology

Seven days. Modern technology means that Shuuzou can calculate the distance between them to startling accuracy, down to the meter (to the foot; he’s over here now even though none of this damn measurement makes any sense, especially fahrenheit temperature) from where he is now, straddling a motorcycle that seems empty with just him on it, the one he returns to the same place at the end of every night, that no one’s realized goes missing yet (looks like no one ever rides it except for him, anyway) to where Tatsuya is, feet buried in the snow in Akita. Shuuzou’s got the weather report up on his phone, the city added right after LA, so he can just open the app and swipe to the right and see, because some days they don’t talk and Tatsuya doesn’t tell him.   
  
Seven days. They haven’t spoken, and Shuuzou feels his fingers fraying, wearing thin like they’re stretched across the ocean and Tatsuya won't touch them, pulled too taut and eroded by the waves, rusted out by all the salt in the ocean. A week isn’t that long, not in the scheme of things, the time they’ve spent apart, some fights they’d had when Tatsuya had still been here. But Shuuzou had known where to find him, then, more than just a GPS location, a street view of his school grounds, the gymnasium where he plays basketball. But now, the silence could mea anything; there is nothing to remind him that he and Tatsuya are of the same world, the same universe. It’s as if Tatsuya has willingly freed himself from orbiting the same sun, a rogue planet that you only see in the vicinity of another star once before it's gone forever.  
  
Shuuzou doesn’t want that; he wants to follow Tatsuya in his orbit, keep chasing him or orbit him if need be, but Tatsuya’s beyond the horizon, vanished, unreachable, and Shuuzou can only hold out his hand so far, for so long.   
  
Eight days and he gets a call. Two in the morning Tatsuya’s time, ten in the morning Shuuzou’s, when Tatsuya knows he has a free period he usually spends outside on the school lawn. They’re not technically allowed to use their phones, but no one cares enough to enforce it, and as Shuuzou picks up his from where it vibrates in his pocket, a few feet away a girl is playing candy crush and two of her friends are trying to find the best angle for a selfie.   
  
“Hey,” says Shuuzou.  
  
“I’m sorry,” says Tatsuya.  
  
A quiet admission, a start.   
  
“How have you been?” says Shuuzou (because with him there’s always a reason, a trigger).  
  
Across the ocean, Tatsuya breathes, and then begins to speak.


	5. nijihimu, red tears

The first time Tatsuya cries in front of Shuu, he doesn’t mean to. But he never means to cry, never in front of anyone else; even when he’s alone and the pressure is building up behind his sinuses it’s always too much trouble to deal with and even though he’s overheard strangers on the bus say that they could use a good cry that sensation’s foreign to Tatsuya. His tears track down his face red, the crimson of blood, leaving stains without the rusty scent, tracks he has to scrub at in the mirror to rid from his face. More trouble than they’re worth.   
  
The thing is, Tatsuya always feels like crying at the last appropriate of times, like when someone’s nice to him and he doesn’t deserve it, when the force of that kindness, extended without price or expectation, unconditionally offered to him, who hardly deserves it, especially from someone like Shuu. He doesn’t want to cry, but the adrenaline from the fight is crashing down on him and Shuu with his busted lip and bloody knuckles is worrying over Tatsuya, who’d started the whole damn thing, known exactly what he was doing but let his impulses take control anyway and Shuu had still had his back.  
  
“I’m fine, Shuu,” he says, and his voice breaks and his eyes are filling and here it comes, revulsion, worry, neither of which he can deal with right now.  
  
“Holy shit, Tatsuya—”  
  
“It’s not blood; they’re always red,” Tatsuya says, as the tears streak down the side of his face, probably bright even in the darkness of the alley.   
  
He’s not expecting Shuu to hug him to his chest. “Oh, Tatsuya.”  
  
The way his voice breaks, in a different way, not the harsh way Tatsuya does, like glass broken pressed over the edge of a table, crunched with shards flying everywhere. It’s a soft crumble like sheet cake, light and sweet, and Tatsuya sobs. He hasn’t let himself cry this much in years, not over anything, only empty sobs or spare tears he couldn’t keep back every once in a while; even at the worst moments he’d turned his sadness to anger but now he just doesn’t have the energy to do that, not to hold it all back. Shuu’s shirt is already bloody, damp and sure to bloom with a red stain under where his eye is. It all comes out of him like a flood, loud noises wrenching from his throat; he pulls back and sees it like some mockery, blood mixed with grease, soaking through to Shuu’s skin.  
  
“My face—“ says Tatsuya.  
  
“We’ll get you home,” says Shuu. “We’ll take care of it.”


	6. kagahimu, last

It is their hands that have built this up before, built it all wrong, constructed it in spires on a faulty foundation. This isn’t how it was supposed to go, but it doesn’t matter how it was supposed to go, only that it hadn’t gone. That it had fallen, collapsed in on itself, the salt pillars of Tatsuya’s fragile self worth toppling and dragging down their relationship with it. To be washed away by the sea, blown away by the wind.   
  
(It had been his fault, too, for hanging on too long to something that wasn’t, for ignoring the foundation shaking beneath their feet, to let them both fall, like all those years ago in the abandoned gym multiplied by every second since then—Tatsuya’s the worst kind of man, the worst kind of brother; he never learns; instead of protecting he’s the one who hurts.)  
  
But it’s Taiga who wants to build it all back up again, who extends his hand, holds it steady over the gravity of the earth, who says with his face, to please trust him again. Tatsuya can’t help but do that; he’d never stopped trusting or loving Taiga (and Taiga whispers, into the side of Tatsuya’s neck, that he’d never stopped trusting or loving either, even when he was at his angriest, even when he’d hurt). It’s Tatsuya who doesn’t dare hope, but it’s Taiga who places the possibility in front of him, bright and shining like a pearl, until he can’t not look at it, can’t not begin to believe.  
  
And they build it back up again, every kiss, every touch of their hands; it’s work. To cross the gap, to repair what they had broken (because they trust but not completely, because they love without caution but not without reservation). To build it back up, reinforce it as a certain chain. It’s work, but then they forget it is. Toward a someday, many somedays, multitudes of possibility spilling over the edge, but just them, two hours on a Sunday night playing NBA Jam on the couch, Tatsuya’s shirt riding up on his stomach until Taiga turns to him with darkening eyes and they let the controllers lie on the table as their virtual players stand in the middle of the court and skin touches skin. And they are each other’s firsts, of nearly everything, but Tatsuya hopes without letting himself that they will be each other’s only, each other’s last.


	7. kagasaku, manga

Artists hate it when you ask them to draw you, at least if what Taiga’s read about on the internet is to be believed. And, well, Ryou’s pretty touchy about a lot of things, and something common like this, well. Taiga’s not going to ask. He doesn’t know very much about the professional world Ryou occupies, outside of the stress as he nears another deadline, the work that goes into it, how much time is spent yelling at paper and pencils to fucking cooperate until a gorgeous final product is produced. Okay, so maybe Taiga knows a bit, but he’s got none of the technical know-how; all he sees is things making progress (or not, the nights when he hauls Ryou off to bed, calms him down with sweet distractions and good food).   
  
Still, Taiga harbors a persistent desire to appear in Ryou’s manga. It probably won’t happen, but, well—it’s not like Ryou’s drawing a world of superheroes or ghost detectives or mermaids; the characters are high school basketball players, like they were when they'd first met. He just doesn’t expect it to be a reality, caught up in the world of Yamaguchi Hisanori and Kokonoe Nobuo and their underfunded boys’ basketball team, the trials and tribulations of coming off a quarterfinal appearance in the Winter Cup when they’d barely had enough money to get to Tokyo in the first place.   
  
Taiga never reads the final product until it comes out; he picks up a copy of Ryou’s publication at the convenience store along with a sandwich of dubious quality and a can of coffee; he can read it on the train while he goes home. The woman next to him wrinkles her nose, as if he’s too old to be reading stuff marketed at kids; Taiga ignores her. He’d heard Ryou muttering something featuring the name Izumi, whom he would guess is the new ace of the regional rival, and sure enough he sees Yamaguchi’s eyes go wide and in the next panel, a shadow. Power forward, number ten, Katsuki Izumi, tall, well-built, and—holy shit.   
  
Taiga’s imagined what he’d look like in Ryou’s style before, and this is it; everything’s there, the hairstyle he’d worn in high school and the eyebrows and what looks like a chain around his neck. Standing behind Katsuki is another guy, though, who looks a little like Ryou, shorter with big eyes and long bangs. Smirking, like Ryou does when he’s been provoked enough and has come back and won, just like he said he would. Fuck, the two of them would be pretty good antagonists, wouldn’t they?


	8. kagahimu, same team au

Tatsuya is shining brighter than Taiga’s ever seen, and he’s had the pleasure of getting to see it all up close, on the floor next to Tatsuya or from the bench, right behind him in practice when they're doing drills because Tatsuya’s never not doing his best, never not pushing himself to do better (never not pushing the team to do better, implicitly or not). With him, it’s obvious what they’ve been missing, why they haven’t gone that far in the playoffs the past couple of years, what they’ve needed, a driving force in every way.   
  
Whenever Tatsuya has the ball, the play goes forward, as a general rule of thumb. It’s not just when he’s playing at the one (though that’s more and more often as they head into the playoffs, and by the middle of the first round his position’s been shifted from guard to point guard in most of the press Tatsuya always tells Taiga not to read), but when eh’s driving through traffic or finding some spot to shoot with no room on any side, when they’re trying to force him to shoot or to pass the ball back and he doesn’t. He knows basketball better than anyone, understands it better than anyone, years of training his mind and body to respond in a certain way, on a level that’s more than just knowledge or conscious thought or muscle memory, something that’s seeped into his bones.  
  
Still, Taiga wonders when they’re on the team plane and the lights are off and Tatsuya’s asleep against the window, if Tatsuya’s beginning to resent him again. He hasn’t acted like it at all, even as his own stats get even more impressive but Taiga’s the one who’s the first to get attention, who draws the best defenders on him first, who’s the primary scoring option. They don’t talk about it much anymore, the things that Tatsuya would have had to make his peace with most of the way if they’re together like they are, Tatsuya’s pinky hooked in Taiga’s under their shared blanket, but the things it’s easier to hide away when you only play each other four times a year, only with each other at international tournaments where they’re placed alongside a handful of the best American players other than them and there’s no time for that shit, barely time to get to know each other’s play styles (but they always do). And, well, Taiga hadn’t seen it coming before (they’d been young; there’d been no precedent; he still can’t help but worry). Does Tatsuya resent that the plays revolve around him getting the ball to Taiga, serving him a pass like this?   
  
The only way to find out is to ask, but Taiga’s afraid of the answer, afraid he might be tearing down their relationship or the team’s success with his own two hands. But he has to ask.  
  
They’re in the cab back to their apartment; the lights of the city outside aren’t a good enough distraction.   
  
“Are you mad? About having to pass to me?”  
  
Tatsuya’s eye widens in the low light; he places his hand on Taiga’s knee. “I’m not. If I really wanted to be a shooter right now, I would be, but you’re doing well. I can swallow my pride for the team, you know.”  
  
“I know, but.”  
  
“Yeah,” Tatsuya says. “But I’m not mad.”  
  
(He’s telling the truth. Definitely, Taiga thinks, when Tatsuya kisses him softly in the entryway, standing on his tiptoes so their faces are more level.)


	9. kagahimu, co-mvps

Co-MVPs. They’re Co-MVPs of the fucking NBA finals. Tatsuya could recite stat lines from the first four games, mixed with his rough estimate of the fifth, without having to think too hard or much at all, his assists and Taiga’s points, his own points, Taiga’s rebounds, and it’s not even the stats; it’s the moments; it’s the game one OT shot Tatsuya had launched, the pass he’d made to Taiga and the pass Taiga had given him back, low and just the right way to let him spring up into a long jumper, leaving the ball just out of his hands as the buzzer had sounded. They’d barely looked back since then, the way they’d thrashed the opposition in game two and game four, the blip in game three, yes, but tonight, in all of its glory, the championship theirs for the taking, but the hadn’t taken chances or assumptions.   
  
People still haven’t stopped taking photos and they’re holding up the trophy between them, Taiga’s arm around Tatsuya’s waist like he’ll never let go (and he’s pretty sure he’d kissed Tatsuya on the cheek in front of the cameras, but Tatsuya had nearly cried and buried his face in the starchy shoulder of Taiga’s championship t-shirt, too). It’s probably physically pretty heavy, but it feels so light, like winning, like scoring has all through this playoff run. Like playing together, for real, like everything they’d dreamed about, winning the championship in LA and sharing the MVP award on this floor, has finally been sealed, immortalized as a covenant in this moment. Tatsuya, still in his Bulls uniform under that shirt, the two of them wearing the same colors, the same thing out on the court, the bright red of the away uniforms still on his shorts, the accents on his sneakers. They don’t even have to say right now how fucking happy they are, the smile lighting up Tatsuya’s face that he almost never shows, even in private, right here. His face looking straight into Taiga’s.   
  
“You earned this,” Taiga says; the photographers are dissipating around them, following the championship trophy as their teammates hold it and kiss it and pose; the MVP is still between the two of them.  
  
“We earned this,” says Tatsuya, shifting the weight of it, so that it’s a little bit less on him and a little more on Taiga (or maybe he’s starting to come down from the high a little, too).  
  
“Yeah,” Taiga says. “Yeah, we did.”


	10. garciraki, boobs

There’s a lot that Alex loves about Masako, and even these components together don't add up to how and why she loves Masako as a whole. A lot of love is without reason, but the good thing about love is that there’s always more to discover that you love about a person, even though you love them so much already. And while building up their relationship with an ocean between them hasn’t been totally ideal, it’s given Alex a true appreciation for Masako’s physical characteristics.   
  
Like her hair, when it’s pulled back in a ponytail and it swishes back and forth behind her head; like her neck, long and slim and revealed to Alex, unadorned but certainly not plain; like the curl of her lip when she’s absolutely determined to accomplish a task; like how tall she stands next to Alex (and how Alex can tease her about being short, especially when she admits to mostly-let-go insecurities about her own height and femininity, and Alex can empathize a little too much about never feeling like you’ve left the gawky taller-than-everyone-else stage behind, and wonders if that’s why Masako likes to surround herself with two-meter-tall high schoolers, or at least partially).   
  
And, specifically, her boobs. Alex loves burying her face in Masako’s chest, rolling over on top of her in bed and fitting her own head and torso against Masako’s body half-awkwardly, her nose poking through the buttons on Masako’s pajama top and hitting her sternum. When Masako hasn’t put anything on yet and they’re bare, her nipples pointed in the cold morning and her skin bumpy with gooseflesh, and she squawks when Alex pulls her in closer and kisses one on the side, sloppy and wet and warm.  
  
“You looked cold,” Alex says.  
  
Masako grumbles, but she doesn’t push Alex off until she’s really running late and needs a bra and a shirt, and Alex has to let her go out the door (and Masako always makes Alex put on something before she leaves so they can say goodbye at the door without the neighbors calling them indecent, but who gives a damn about what they say).   
  
There have been times when Masako has complained about her chest being so average, but really it isn’t. So Alex makes sure to show Masako, and tell her when she can’t, that her chest is way, way above that.


	11. aomido, work

Aomine’s fucking tired today, and he’s pretty sure Midorima won’t be home before he gets there. He texts that he’s picking up dinner at the fast-food joint on the corner (he only goes there as often as he does because of their loyalty program, something Midorima says doesn’t actually save him that much money since if he didn’t go there as much he would spend less money instead of spending more for the free large fries, but whatever, it tastes good). Midorima doesn’t answer; Aomine’s sure he’s still at work.  
  
He’s not, though; when Aomine arrives at home Midorima is on the couch, his computer open, running his numbers in that stupid graphing program.  
  
“Babe, you're here early.”  
  
He kisses Midorima’s cheek, and Midorima barely reacts. “I have to fun these numbers; I won’t be able to do any experiments tomorrow if I don’t do this now.”  
  
Aomine rolls his eyes. “You said that last night, and the night before. Why can’t you do your numbers when you’re on the clock? That’s part of the job description, too.”  
  
“It has to get done,” says Midorima.  
  
“Yeah, but what happens if your experiments get pushed back one day? You’re not even close to putting out a paper, right? So one day shouldn’t make a difference.”  
  
“But if I can—”  
  
“You have to take care of yourself,” says Aomine, snapping the laptop shut and snatching it away (he’s still too fast for Midorima; their too-occasional basketball sessions have already proved that).   
  
“I need to do work,” says Midorima. “Give it back.”  
  
“Babe, listen,” says Aomine. “You do this every damn day. You don’t get paid for it. You’re not going to get fired and the work’s not going to fail if you just, you know, spend time with your boyfriend and eat dinner without one hand on the mouse for one day. I just…I’m trying to make time for you, and I want this relationship to work.”  
  
“Oh,” says Midorima.   
  
He doesn’t reach for the laptop again, and Aomine puts it back, offering his hand to Midorima instead. After one second, one more glance at the laptop and its pulsing light, he reaches back, and Aomine squeezes his fingers.   
  
“Hey, you’ve had a long day. Relax. I brought you some food.”  
  
Midorima nods. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be,” says Aomine, kissing his cheek. “Just be here with me now. Tell me about the horoscopes or something.”  
  
Midorima nods, and they make their way to the kitchen.


	12. kagahimu, planning a wedding

The wedding was a horrible idea. Getting married isn’t, but at this point Taiga would rather just throw everything out and elope in Mexico. Tatsuya’s mother has her own ideas, like having several different outfits and a live orchestra, an expensive venue that they could probably afford but since Taiga’s dad put his foot down about how he’s paying for his only son’s wedding, Taiga absolutely refuses to make him pay for. They don’t need hundreds of guests; Tatsuya’s cousins are fine and mutual friends are also fine but the relatives his dad never speaks to? His old nanny’s mother, whom he's never even met?   
  
There is a certain side of that Taiga can understand; he’d probably want to be involved if his only child was getting married, especially if he was retired and bored, and she’s done a lot of the legwork and navigated some of the planning that’s too much of a headache for Taiga. Tatsuya himself has been mostly hands-off throughout the whole process, which is both good and not, especially when Tatsuya does have a strong opinion about something. Because Taiga would give in, except when it’s whose side Alex should be on because she’s both of theirs and means different things to both of them (as well as the same) and she’s just as important to Tatsuya as she is to Taiga. Which is why it’s so goddamn hard, and why they fight about it and get legitimately mad, and why they’re lying in bed with a few months to the wedding not facing each other, and Taiga lets a dumb intrusive thought go all the way through his mouth.  
  
“What if we just eloped?”  
  
“So neither of us get anything?”  
  
“No. Alex could get that internet certification and do the ceremony.”  
  
Tatsuya’s arm slips around Taiga’s waist, but he doesn’t say anything.  
  
“Your mom would be mad, though.”  
  
Tatsuya hums. “We could still have the wedding, but like, purely ceremonial. Do all the shinto stuff to cover our religious bases. I do want to see you in a wedding kimono, and a tux, and after that when you’re wearing a little less so we can have good wedding night sex we’ve waited all evening for.”  
  
“But where would Alex be then?”  
  
Tatsuya sighs. “Well. I guess I could let you have her. As long as she stands slightly on my side when she marries us.”  
  
Taiga snorts into Tatsuya’s neck, and Tatsuya kicks his ankle gently.   
  
“Kidding. Mostly.”  
  
“I mean….if you want…”  
  
“Taiga,” says Tatsuya, rolling over on top of him, staring down, letting Taiga reach up to push his bangs off his face. “All I care about is that I get a day—or two days—where I get to stare at you and think about how much I love you.”  
  
“Oh,” says Taiga, and then, “You think that’s not what I want out of this? Even though I’m like, planning and stuff? I want our special day to be special and look good, but I’m probably not going to notice what color the napkins are when I’m looking at you the whole time.”  
  
“Really? Because you were arguing pretty hard about that with my mom the other day.”  
  
Tatsuya sinks down on top of Taiga’s chest, and Taiga kisses him on the forehead; he knows Tatsuya’s mostly kidding this time.


	13. nijihai, sacrilege

Shougo kind of resents looking like he needs saving or something, but he still takes the pamphlet the old lady in the street pushes on him, the bright words on the front proclaiming that he, too, can be saved, found where he was a lost sheep. He’s vaguely familiar with Christianity, to the extent that it involves Christmas and Easter and crosses and that Jesus was executed, that church is on Sunday and there’s a lot of enthusiastic westerners involved.   
  
JESUS DIED FOR YOU, reads the inside of the front cover, and Shougo tosses the pamphlet on the floor of the train.  
  
Across the car, an old man looks annoyed at him, but does not say anything. Shougo gets off at the next stop and sets off on the familiar route to Shuuzou’s apartment, only a few blocks away. Not soon enough. Jesus died for him, huh? Shougo, who’s not religious at all and can’t even bother to follow the loosely-defined tenets of religion around him, who would never go out of his way to convert to Christianity. What a crock of shit, and what an idiot. Shougo wouldn’t die for Jesus. Not for anyone—maybe Shuuzou, but Shuuzou would probably be mad if he did.  
  
“What if I died for you?” is how Shougo ends up greeting Shuuzou, and Shuuzou raises an eyebrow.  
  
“You’d better not be thinking of doing that. There are better ways with less dying to show you love me.”  
  
Shougo sighs and sits down, and Shuuzou pulls him in to give him the sloppy kind of kiss he knows Shougo doesn’t like. Shougo elbows him in the stomach.  
  
“I got this religious pamphlet that said Jesus died for me. What a fuckin’ idiot. Anyway, I dunno, I wouldn’t die for him and I don’t think I’d die for anyone, but, uh.”  
  
This sounded a lot less pathetic in his head, and Shuuzou looks like he’s about to burst out laughing.   
  
“What?” says Shougo. “It’s legit. Some lady pushed this thing on me; I wasn’t going to actually convert.”  
  
“Yeah, okay,” says Shuuzou. “Don’t forget to invite me to your baptism.”  
  
Shougo rolls his eyes. “I told you. I wouldn’t die for Jesus, and I’m not going to like, act guilty even if he did die for me.”  
  
“I don’t think the point is that he died for you individually,” says Shuuzou. “It’s like, humanity as a whole.”  
  
“Damn, I thought I was special,” says Shougo.


	14. aomuramido, perfect fifth

Midorima is like a perfect fifth, Aomine decides, as he plays one and watches Midorima react, his face buried in the sheet music as usual. It’s just practice, but that means he won’t get yelled at too badly if his mind wanders a bit and he screws up. The perfect fifth is almost a cliche, like a tryhard, like someone like Midorima who wants to try hard and get things back into something recognizable as neat even to people who don’t know music that well. Most of their audience does, though, or pretends to, and besides, Aomine’s not really playing for them. Maybe he’s just got the luxury of saying that because they make a tidy income from chamber music, but he’s playing for Midorima and Murasakibara, and for himself.   
  
He bows across a sour note and Midorima frowns; Aomine sighs and lifts his chin, catching his violin in a well-practiced move that Midorima hates.   
  
“You’ll drop and break it; that’s a good instrument.”  
  
“I won’t,” says Aomine, placing it on top of the piano and pivoting the chair so he can sit on it backwards.   
  
Midorima sighs; he usually doesn’t give up this easily, but he’s probably more annoyed that Murasakibara’s gotten sidetracked at the vending machine again and is, of course, late (later than they are, anyway).   
  
*  
  
Midorima’s the last one there the next time, and Aomine ends up on a bus snarled in a traffic jam the time after that, on his way over hanging out with Kuroko downtown. He sends a message via the group text that he’ll be a while longer; Murasakibara sends back a one-word reply and Midorima nothing. Aomine will find a way to make it up to the two of them; he always does (maybe they can keep trading being the late one, or maybe he can find some obscure editorial edition of a concerto that Midorima keeps talking about and buy Murasakibara two extra giant cookies the next time they go to a particular cafe; maybe he can apologize honestly and play the shit out of the violin for them and give them both blow jobs not out of obligation but because he wants to).   
  
His mind drifts back to that thought about Midorima as a perfect fifth—if he’s that, then Murasakibara’s a minor third, way more complex than he lets on, played the wrong way a lot, but if you take the time—yeah. So together they’re a nice minor chord, and what does that make Aomine? The overtones? He’s probably a little less subtle than that. Maybe the dominant, a little redundant but throwing them just a little bit off-balance when they’re all together (or, though, if he’s on violin he’s usually on top, so it’s maybe not that off-balance there, and he’s finally at the right stop).  
  
He steps quietly through the halls toward the practice room, and he’s glad of it. The door is slightly ajar and he can hear the strains of a familiar piece, that Rachmaninoff barcarolle for four hands that they’d all seen together at their music school, so long ago. Murasakibara’s awfully good at piano for a cellist; he should do it more. Who cares if it’s harder to find arrangements for four hand piano and a violin? Aomine’s content to just watch and listen to them.


	15. murahimu, dullahan

Atsushi’s seen the riders before, usually from a distance, but sometimes close by. The blond one, who beckons him to join with a free hand, the one who looks like a gorilla, the tall and slim one hunched on his horse, the head that he places on his shoulders and lets roll off like a basketball. But then the new one, elegant on his steed, as if he’d been doing it for a thousand years. Are spirits like this eternal? Atushi doesn’t care that much to find out, but none of the ones he’s seen have changed at all since he was a terrified child, clutching his older sister’s hand.   
  
The new one comes closer bit by bit. Instead of veering erratically, each night he rides closer and closer to the bridge. A flash of black hair, half the face thrown in shadow. Pale fingertips. A red-brown horse, ordinary, as if it could have come from one of the local stables, but whose feet vanish into smoke and steam, into the fog that is never there except when the riders come, that may not be tangible but Atsushi knows there’s no use touching it (it probably won’t grab him in, even if he can feel it, but).   
  
The first time he sees the new one up close, he’s struck still almost, like the first time after he’d begged his sister to take him to see. The grin is wide, hideous but beautiful, almost artistically done, almost like a mockery of the real thing. Like his face has been carved from glass or marble, though he keeps half of it in shadow, perhaps some bump or disfiguration under the hair that covers half his face from when he’d been executed, his body keeping it and carrying it onward just like the severing. The rotting stump of a neck, spiking upward, pale sun bleached bone at the very top.   
  
“You’re staring.”  
  
“You’re not like them,” says Atsushi.  
  
“Oh, isn’t that interesting.”  
  
A flash of teeth in the grin, as wide as the whole face. One beautiful eye, flashing just as brightly, framed by long lashes. Again, like a portrait, like a piece of art. Atsushi should run, but part of him doesn’t want to, wants to find out more about this one of them (careful, his sister’s voice whispers, but it’s not very loud in his head).  
  
“Were you trying to pay me a compliment?”  
  
“I was telling the truth,” Atsushi says, directly to the head.   
  
Its grin is silent, until the horse rears and the rider turns. Atsushi follows.


	16. murahimu + liuhimu, werewolf au

The first thing Atsushi learns after joining a proper pack is that all that alpha beta bullshit is just bullshit, in fact. Araki is the de facto leader, Okamura and Fukui her deputies, just because they’ve been here the longest, but Atsushi’s opinion holds nearly equal weight, as does Wei’s. As does Tatsuya’s when he joins, when they wake up after a full moon to find a grey wolf transforming slowly and painfully. He must be new at this; they’ve all been born this way or bitten in early childhood and their bodies are far more used to it. Still, Tatsuya doesn’t complain, doesn’t act as tired as he must feel (they all know it, but he hides it, even when Wei lets him lean against him, under the guise of what seems to actually become real courtship).  
  
Atsushi’s not jealous, but Tatsuya’s pretty as a human. Pretty as a wolf, too, lean and grey, even though the persistent limp and sightless eye are more obvious when they’re running wild through the forest. Even though Tatsuya can’t keep up with him. He’s pretty sure Tatsuya can smell the want on him; the first year or so is always a time of hypersensitivity and, well.   
  
“It’s okay,” Tatsuya says, when Atsushi slips back in from watch and Araki takes her turn. “If you don’t mind sharing.”  
  
Atsushi supposes he doesn’t; this isn’t the ache of need or dissatisfaction, and only a little jealousy. A lot of that doesn’t work too well in a pack, and it all goes away once Tatsuya starts coming to him, too, spending some nights in Atsushi’s bed or pressed between Atsushi and Wei, held up by trust (and, well, two other people are warmer than one other or none at all, and it gets cold out here at night).   
  
Every full moon could be their last; every full moon there are more and more hunters. They don’t howl as much or as freely as they used to; Atsushi’s never heard Tatsuya’s wolf voice and isn’t sure if Tatsuya’s ever used it.   
  
He hears shots and crashing at the end of the night, under the setting moon, as he prowls back through the underbrush. He can smell the humans, the smoke from their guns (regular bullets, fucking stupid trophy hunting cesspits, he thinks; not that it can’t kill but that kind of lodged bullet death is slow and painful). When he gets back to the cave he’s already human; the sun is spreading shadows across the entrance. Okamura is bleeding from a scrape; everyone else is fine, asleep, human. Wei’s form is curled around Tatsuya, a position where he’d probably been comfortable as a wolf, but just looks awkward now. Wei’s eyes open a crack as Atsushi lays down beside them and he nods, nuzzling back against Tatsuya. They smell like the underbrush, like fresh prey, like they’d been far away from sparks and heavy metal bullets. Atsushi falls asleep with his face buried in Tatsuya’s hair.


	17. murahimu, robot au

Tatsuya’s overclocked again, both of his primary processors this time. The fan behind his ear is smoking, and his whole body is hotter than Atsushi’s ever felt it. With a sigh, he unscrews the bolt keeping Tatsuya’s scalp in place and lets the smoke clear. He doesn’t look too bad this time, and Atsushi hates that he knows all of this, that he knows about processors and chips almost too delicate for his large fingers to handle, because his robot boyfriend is way too greedy and way too willing and eager to upgrade himself, to download buggy software that promises to hack his body and his brain and definitely does that, only it means he’s out of commission for at least a day and up to a couple of weeks and his parts have to be replaced and every time he’s putting the terabytes of solid state storage in his brain at risk.   
  
He hasn’t blown that out, not yet.  
  
“Stupid Muro-chin,” Atsushi mutters.   
  
They do have processors, better ones that Atsushi had been saving to give to Tatsuya, bought at some gaming shop where the nerdy kid behind the counter had given Atsushi a suspicious look and said he didn’t look much like a gamer. Then again, Tatsuya’s probably going to try and overclock those at some point, too, but for now they should be okay (forever they should; Atsushi’s always saying he doesn’t need to process things any faster, that his GPU, as faulty as it is (and as impossible to replace without breaking him—Tatsuya’s tried) is the real bottleneck and he’s already more than okay so give it a rest). At least, they’ll let Tatsuya function.  
  
“Stop making me worry like this,” says Atsushi, as he removes the grime from the inside of Tatsuya’s head, pulls out the smoked processors. He wants Tatsuya back right away, but he’s still too hot; Atsushi’s surprised the chips haven't melted yet. Atsushi sighs, and as is getting more and more usual, Tatsuya doesn’t respond. There ought to be a way robots can be reprogrammed to think they’re good enough, except Atsushi wouldn’t go for that. He wouldn’t want to change Tatsuya, as vexing as he is, as much as wanting to be better, wanting to be more, wanting to keep up with the latest models, is an integral part of Tatsuya. Not unless that comes naturally, not unless Murasakibara teaches it to him like you’re supposed to be able to with robots but in a way Murasakibara’s no good at. Or maybe Tatsuya’s just programmed to be stubborn, too, and there’s no overcoming that—but Atsushi’s not going to give up when he’s still got the chance to win.


	18. akahimu, rakuzan!tatsuya au

There is defeat in this kind of victory. Small defeats everywhere, but it is not the sum of individual battles that decide a war. This is not Seijuurou’s perfect, absolute victory, though perhaps it is nominally, and it is victories like this, overcoming setbacks, that make the best sports stories. If you don’t have to live them. Reo’s knees, Seijuurou’s worldview. Those are going to stick around and make things even harder next year, next Interhigh and next Winter Cup, no matter who they face along the way.  
  
Tatsuya’s position as Taiga’s brother has less directly to do with that, but he’d lost in a fair match. Were this a one-on-one, it would have been his defeat. Taiga can block his shot now; it might as well be useless (well, not useless, but—what else could Tatsuya possibly use? He’s not like the Seirin team, pulling new tricks out of their ass right and left). The ring around is neck is heavy, a mockery. This is how they meet again, on the court. There is despair in Taiga’s teammates’ eyes, a refusal to accept this victory as legitimate. They still see themselves playing a certain role, but they should know life isn’t fair. Victory does not always come to the righteous. Rakuzan had the better team; they should have won better than they did.   
  
That’s the kind of thing Seijuurou understands, hurdles that grow higher the more you rise into the air, impossible to clear, standards you cannot even reach to haul yourself over, goals that move too quickly. Seijuurou’s just better at clearing them, at being perfect, than Tatsuya had ever been. Tatsuya sits down beside him; Seijuurou’s still wearing his basketball uniform.  
  
“You should at least change into your tracksuit.”  
  
Seijuurou looks up at him; it’s both strange and not strange at all to see both eyes red. “Himuro? I’m sorry.”  
  
“Tatsuya. Please.” (The only normal thing about all of this had been Seijuurou’s willingness to call him by his first name.)  
  
“I—”  
  
“Seijuurou.”  
  
Seijuurou nods. “If you wish it.”  
  
Tatsuya brushes his lips over Seijuurou’s forehead; perhaps he’s only being like this so he gives Tatsuya some control in this storm; perhaps he’s thinking about the way Tatsuya had sat frozen and locked to the bench all through the third quarter with Mayuzumi out on the court instead. Or perhaps Seijuurou is just a kid, who isn’t always playing the five-dimensional chess Kotarou claims he is, who just needs a little reassurance and validation. Tatsuya knows all about that.


	19. kikuro, gavage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stuffing/gavage/cannibalism, borderline body horror

Kuroko had resisted at first, but Kise doesn’t feel that guilty. Not when he overpowers Kuroko physically so easily, and not when there had been something so pleasant about shoving the feeding tube down Kuroko’s throat, when there is something so pleasant about feeding him every chance he gets.  
  
Kuroko is restrained, so he can't move, can’t expend that much energy, so that all of his muscles turn to fat and all of the food he eats goes that way, too. Already, his cheeks are rounder and his collarbones are hidden; his stomach is puffed out and swollen and were he to walk, his thighs would brush together. Just enough and he’ll be plump like a suckling pig, perfect to roast over a spit.  
  
“What a lovely picture you’ll be, Kurokocchi,” Kise croons.  
  
Kuroko glares at him, but it’s offset by those soft blue eyes, those chubby cheeks, the fat on his upper arms. He’s so cute like this; it will be a shame when Kise doesn’t get to enjoy seeing him, the rise and fall of his chest. He feeds Kuroko a little more, an extra treat, watches as Kuroko tries to force it back up, choke on it, as he refuses to swallow it down but the feeding tube is merciless. It knows what’s best for him, how to fatten him up and turn him into what he ought to be.  
  
“Just a little more. You’ll be a perfect supper, Kurokocchi. You’re lucky you’re not taller; otherwise you’d be ready by now. This way you get to enjoy it, huh?”  
  
There’s a venom in Kuroko’s glare that Kise would feign shock at if he cared to. But they’re beyond that point, Kuroko pretending not to care and Kise pretending to care too much, a pointless charade lost to a long time ago, a place not so far away but that might as well be. A different world than the small room where Kuroko lives, his skin growing paler with its growing distance from the sun, in time and space. There is no light other than the one that Kise provides, the pale glow of the fixture in the ceiling. All of that is intentional.  
  
“You’re only mine,” Kise says. “And all mine. All of you.”  
  
(So much of him now, his stomach spilling over his crotch, fat on his knees, on his feet like a small child, so delicious Kise could just eat him raw. But he’s got more patience than people give him credit for.)


	20. akakise, mirror

Kise hadn’t really understood Akashi at the start. He’d supposed Akashi hadn’t wanted to be understood (not that that’s not even more of a motivator), but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. And sometimes it takes a while to grasp a shallow enough understanding to get used to the feel of the water and reach your hand in deeper. He couldn’t copy Akashi at the start, and that’s how he’d understood basketball, anyway, observation and synchronization. He couldn’t really understand the others that way, either but they were easy enough on their own, even at their most complex.   
  
Copying Akashi, though, leads him a layer down and to a glimpse of how well-organized Akashi is, well-organized and categorized but no less complex, an intricate machine, the insides of a supercomputer’s circuitry. Only Akashi is not so easily replicable; he might enjoy that comparison or at least that might be what he’s going for. The machine whose processing power outstrips a human’s, the machine who will always win and always be right, the black box of absolute. But he’s human, too much entropy and randomness floating around, and perhaps he’s not as invincible as he would like to be.  
  
Kuroko proves it before Kise can get a shot at doing it himself, but Kuroko’s the one who always seems to come out far more on top than he should be (as wonderful as he is, as much as Kise likes him).   
  
He mentions the same to Akashi, and Akashi nods. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”  
  
(There was a time when Kise had been fascinated by the idea of reaching in behind the mirrors of Kuroko’s eyes and figuring out how he worked, but that time is not now. It’s not that Kuroko is boring, even to him, it’s just that Akashi is far more fascinating, far more formidable.)  
  
“We need him back on our side, huh, Akashicchi?”  
  
Akashi smiles; it’s the kind of thought he perhaps would have had, still ten steps ahead of Kise and growing exponentially; however fast Kise moves and whichever shortcuts he takes to understanding there is always more of Akashi to comprehend, more Kise simply doesn’t understand yet. More complexity, and perhaps in this relationship (as it were) he will always be the one chasing. Like basketball, the way he can’t quite copy everything all the time, the way it doesn’t all assimilate.  
  
“Do you think you’d get bored with me, Kise?”  
  
Kise exhales slowly and shrugs. It’s closer to no from this vantage point, where even if he does eventually come to understand all of Akashi that he knows there will still be more, and even if he finds it all, parsing through it, filtering it between his fingers like sand—that’s going to take time. It’s a thought that’s still finishing its way through his head when Akashi kisses him.


	21. kiyohyuu, empire

Hyuuga knows a lot about empires. The empires that have fallen, halfway lost to history, the ones that have fallen and been preserved better, emperors and dictators leading troops across the field to conquer. Strategies and soldiers, moved constantly, the way he does in pale imitation with his model troops. The truth is that the stakes are too low here, with any of his strategies, despite how important they are to him. The worst that could happen is that his little brother steals a soldier for his diorama, that they could get knocked over by the dog when Hyuuga’s parents let her in the house, that Kiyoshi will come over and play with them like dolls and smile as he goes because he’s that fucking aggravating.  
  
There’s no death; there are no real people at stake, there is no land, that as strategic as it is to hold, will fall to him, under his feet. He can watch an old war movie and close his eyes and smell the blood and dirt and it washes out of his nose too quickly, replaced by the real scent of aftershave from the barbershop, his mother’s cooking, the sweat of the Seirin locker room.   
  
He thinks of crossing distances, crossing the court to get the shot in, crossing town to go to a university with an established basketball program (he’s done the unsteady fledgling thing and there’s a certain pride in it, but no one had ever discounted Caesar because the republic was already there when he had risen to power, had they?) and he thinks of his soldiers crossing the table to take the day. He thinks of himself, crossing the Pacific, in a plane, at the mercy of a pilot and jet engines and a giant machine, rather than on top of his own horse. There is nothing over there he can conquer, nothing but a desert city where Kiyoshi is.   
  
And that is everything, everything Hyuuga has set store by, everything he has built up in his mind, everything he has built up in his body. They are too far removed from the age of empires to start that again; he will never have that kind of blood in his hands, no sword or ancient gun at his belt, nothing but himself, his feelings bundled up inside of him, nothing he can present to Kiyoshi, no empire he can build him and say, this is all for you. This, held within the feelings hauled over, is the only empire he will ever build.


	22. takamido, fantasy sausage

“Today’s lucky item for Cancer,” says Midorima. “Is a fantasy sausage.”  
  
Takao nearly chokes on his normal breath of air. “A fantasy sausage? Wow, Shin-chan, that’s bold. I don’t think we could get away with you holding me there all day, but—”  
  
Midorima’s face is flushed pink; his lips are parted and it's no stretch to imagine them around that particular fantasy sausage Takao had just been referring to (although, he has never referred to his dick as such before, maybe he ought to start if it’s this easy to get a reaction from Midorima). “A fantasy sausage is a baked good.”  
  
“Oh? Does it come between buns?”  
  
“Stop it, Takao,” Midorima hisses. “Don’t be lewd. I looked it up. Though there are some, ah, adult meanings of the phrase, a fantasy sausage is a piece of grilled meat drizzled with cheese on a sesame roll.”  
  
“I bet the meat’s juicy,” says Takao. “Dripping—”  
  
“Are you going to help me or not?” says Midorima.  
  
(Takao decides that it might be wise to be quiet right now and not offer to unzip his uniform pants and let Midorima give him a blow job.)  
  
“Good. Not all bakeries sell them, so we have to get going if we don’t want to be late for school.”  
  
Takao also does not point out that they always get there early, though he’s not looking forward to pedaling the rickshaw through that much traffic, even if it means he gets to see Midorima talking about fantasy sausages with a bunch of most likely confused bakers. Takao’s pretty sure he’s never seen anything with that name at a bakery before, because he’d definitely remember and get a lot of mileage out of that joke.   
  
They get kicked out of two bakeries; two more don’t sell it; finally they stop at one fairly close to Shutoku which advertises fantasy sausages in the window and, well. Takao has to admit they look pretty tasty. He orders one as well, and Midorima looks at him in surprise; Takao just manages not to snicker as he says it.   
  
“Scorpio’s lucky item is a keychain,” says Midorima.  
  
“I got one of those,” says Takao, taking a bite out of the sausage. “This is pretty good, Shin-chan. Want some of my fantasy sausage?”  
  
Midorima huffs, his own paper bag from the bakery tucked safely in his schoolbag. Takao takes another bite; the cheese stretches from his mouth to the top of the sausage.  
  
“If you're sure…”  
  
“Fine,” says Midorima.  
  
“How’s my fantasy sausage taste?” Takao asks, as Midorima takes a bite (were Midorima anyone else, he would probably flip Takao the bird).  
  
“Adequate,” says Midorima.  
  
“Gee, thanks, what a great boyfriend,” says Takao.


	23. liuhimu, girl gang

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone in yosen is a girl

It takes Himuro a while to get used to riding a motorbike with long skirt, and, well. Once she proves she can, she stops doing it—sure, it goes against the traditional image, but she’s not very traditional, and it’s a hell of a lot easier for her to kick ass in pants or a shorter skirt.   
  
“I like your kind of trouble,” says Liu as she cleans up Himuro’s busted lip, swiping a little to hard with the alcohol on the cotton swab.   
  
“Didn’t think all of you would keep me around if you didn’t,” says Himuro.   
  
Liu’s the one who kisses her, long fingers on either side of her face, reaching into her hair to tangle into it, rubbing at the split ends (she should cut it soon, she thinks, but Liu should dye her roots, the rusty brown giving way to a darker shade for several inches at least). Her mouth is sweet and her lips less swollen; her face is too high for anyone to reach except Okamura or Murasakibara, and they wouldn’t punch her anyway, even accidentally.   
  
“You should wear a shorter skirt, too,” says Himuro. “Show off your legs, huh.”  
  
Her own legs are pretty long but they’re nothing next to Liu’s, the way she has to fold herself up to fit into a twin bed without Himuro next to her, the way knee socks come up to the middle of her calves. Liu snorts.   
  
“I’m good this way.”  
  
And, well, she can fight like that, a flamenco dancer with a whirling kick and spin, the blunt end of her wooden sword hitting just the right pressure point on an opponent, one leg swinging over the side of her motorbike and the taillights dancing in the distance like a nebula before Himuro catches up, the stark white of Liu’s surgical mask gleaming under the streetlights. Or the sun as it comes up, early in Akita as they approach the summer, walking back though they feel like limping. But it’s never about how you feel here; it’s never about what you want. It’s about how you present yourself, the five of them, out for blood, holding each other’s backs up against the wind and against whoever crosses them. Modifying their motorcycles so they sound even louder, cutting across the quiet night in a residential district, warning everyone that they’re here and they aren’t afraid to make noise and assert themselves, to shout that they’re here and they’re ready for it all.


	24. murahimu, language barrier

Murasakibara remembers things, filtered like dust in a sunbeam, something he grabs at but never holds. A pretty face, staring at beautiful lips as they mouth foreign words, as they mouth words that are closer to something he understand but he cannot hear through the haze of a dream, a recollection. What a bother, to meet someone who speaks a different language again and again, to go through that each time. He wonders what makes it worth it, chasing a memory, the other person chasing him, something that must be the key to everything.   
  
(He thinks about the time he couldn’t hear at all, signing words to a perplex face that mouthed things slowly against his palm, drawing shitty pictograms for each other until they both understood enough to get by—sometimes their meetings, raw communication, is out of necessity, out of loneliness, being a foreigner in land of people with no patience for you.)  
  
Murasakibara meets Himuro on a professional basketball team. Himuro’s been drafted out of some college, American with a Japanese name. He doesn’t speak Japanese, though, only bits and pieces, half-forgotten. He understands some of what Murasakibara tells his interpreter; Murasakibara can tell he’s trying to pick things out of sentences, words and phrases that he’d known once. Murasakibara’s English is better than it had been when he moved here, but all he can really do is order coffee and run basketball plays. It’s enough to start, except all of a sudden it isn’t, because he wants to tell Himuro things, talk to him and make him laugh, say something that isn’t casual or clunky or accented for either of them.   
  
(It’s Himuro who meets him in the middle first, rusty and overly-polite syllables he stumbles over and references to pop culture that are probably older than he is, and Murasakibara deletes the language software from his computer—he’ll learn a little more sooner or later, and maybe he can get Himuro to teach him as long as it leads somewhere else.)  
  
“I remember, too,” says Himuro, looking up at Murasakibara as if to confirm that he’d said it right.  
  
“Good,” says Murasakibara, and he’s not sure if Himuro gets his meaning, so he kisses him, short and punctuated for emphasis.  
  
“Good,” Himuro echoes, clearly not comprehending, totally lost but pretending like he’s not.  
  
But that’s always how he is, and it’s still got the same annoying kind of charm.


	25. takamido, calling the number on the bathroom wall

Midorima’s not expecting the number written on the bathroom wall to actually connect, but it gives him something to do, another line of hope to cling to before it disintegrates. He hears the tone of the ringer, and then, as he expects it to simply keep ringing or connect to voice mail, someone picks up.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
Midorima doesn’t say anything.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Hello,” Midorima says. “I found your number written on the side of a bathroom stall.”  
  
There is silence on the other end. Then, “you calling for a good time?”  
  
“I need help,” says Midorima.   
  
“Like, help getting off? I mean, I’m good, but—”  
  
“No. I’m in a bathroom stall and I need a can of black coffee.”  
  
Silence on the other end again.  
  
“I’ll pay you back for your troubles; you can buy yourself something, too, and I’ll pay you—”  
  
“Whoa, whoa. You want me, a total stranger slash potential phone sex operator, to come and give you a can of coffee in a bathroom stall.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Good—“  
  
“Wait! I’m serious; I need this,” says Midorima, and there must be something in his voice because he does not hear the beep that signifies the end of the call. “It’s my lucky item. Do you know Oha-Asa, the horoscope show? Cancer is ranked twelfth today, and I wasn’t able to procure my lucky item before terrible things started happening to me.”  
  
“How do you know the toilet’s not going to flood?”  
  
“I’m serious,” says Midorima.  
  
“Okay, okay,” says the person at the other end. “Some weird shit like this you can’t make it up. What bathroom?”  
  
“The one in the university library.”  
  
“Oh, yeah, I know that one. Be there in half an hour,” says the voice at the other end, and disconnects.  
  
Half an hour later, the toilet has still not flooded and nothing else has happened to Midorima. His pants are still ripped straight up the back and his shoes and socks are still drying from the puddle, although his schoolbag has not sprouted any holes and all of his work is in good condition (it’s another hour and a half before his next class, thankfully). His phone is still in working order, though there are no new updates from his contact, until the door to the bathroom bursts open.  
  
“Yo, coffee boy, you here?”  
  
“I’m here,” Midorima says, pushing open the door to the stall.  
  
He’d known what the person at the other line was advertising, but he still didn’t expect him to look this good in person—suddenly Midorima is all too aware of his wet shoes and ruined pants, and how pathetic he must have sounded on the phone, but then again, the other person’s staring right back at him.


	26. momoriko, seirin!momoi

“You don’t have a manager. I’d like to apply.”  
  
“We don’t need a manager,” Riko says.   
  
“I know you don’t,” says the pink-haired first year in front of her. “But playing without one is an unnecessary handicap.”  
  
*  
  
The thing is, and Riko will never admit it, they do need her. Not to exist, not to be a team; six players and a manager had been enough for that at the beginning. But they need Satsuki to win, Satsuki and her strategic mindset honed behind one of the finest middle-school coaching staffs in the country, Satsuki who’s methods and training feel a little like cheating they’re so good. Kuroko is their Teikou player, their quote-unquote miracle (whether he is or isn’t, well, that’s an unnecessary distinction); Kagami’s their ace; Fukuda, Kawahara, and Furihata will ascend someday. But Satsuki is their centerpiece, the caramel truffle in the chocolate box with extra drizzle on top.  
  
She’s not afraid to stand up to Riko, and Riko hates her for it, except when she’s right, infuriatingly pretty, a swish of her hair and a note on her clipboard, the lip biting thing she does that has to be on purpose, even though they’d all be looking at her anyway. At first, Riko thinks she might be ugly jealous of Satsuki, the attention she gets from Hyuuga and Koganei; she refuses to let that get the better of her. Really, though, it takes a while to figure out but she’s jealous of Hyuuga and Koganei, how Satsuki’s luring them in. She doesn't want to be lured and ensnared, as easy a target as a simple-minded high school boy. But she wants to be worthy of the attempt in Satsuki’s eyes, and what does that say about her?  
  
*  
  
Perhaps that says less than the victories they achieve, Riko calling the shots and Satsuki gently correcting her aim; at the end of the day Riko’s pride is worth less than victory. Less than a damn good argument, the one that Satsuki makes about Kagami’s leg; he’s not ready to continue but they have to push—but he is fifteen, and Riko’s not the one who gets to decide that for him, if his leg falters. He’s not ready to pay the price, either.  
  
They lose that game; Hyuuga yells at her and Riko yells at him and at the end of the day they sweep that aside. Kagami’s leg recovers; the Winter Cup draws near and so does Satsuki’s best friend, the school she’d almost gone to, the things she refuses to talk about.   
  
*  
  
Riko doesn’t know why she kisses Satsuki, in that moment, because they’ve beaten Touou or because of the beautiful relief on Satsuki’s face, the tears she’s cried, too many already. But when she pulls back she realizes Satsuki’s been waiting for this, and she scowls.  
  
“You should have done it.”  
  
“I thought you liked taking the lead.”


	27. nijihimu, afterlife au

Shuuzou cannot quite remember how he got here, right now, as if he’s just awoken from a terrible sort of dream and he’s discombobulated, as if sleep paralysis has taken hold of him for an hour and he as been lying there all morning halfway pulled into a dream. This is Tokyo; he should be at—he should be in LA right now, shouldn’t he? He thinks his brother is about to graduate from high school, or had already graduated; maybe that’s his sister’s graduation he’s remembering all over again. He rubs his wrist; it feels strange as if he’s just injured it, except.   
  
“Shuu?”  
  
He whirls around so quickly he almost keeps turning all the way back, that if he weren’t already kind of disoriented he would be now. Because he can’t think very much in terms of certainty, but he has been certain for years now that Tatsuya’s dead. A freak malfunction in a jet engine over the Pacific, a crash whose aftermath had bankrupted an entire airline, waiting for days, sitting with Tatsuya’s parents, the not blood brother with the same necklace who was just becoming Shuuzou’s friend, who had said afterwards that it hurt to look at Shuuzou and Shuuzou had known exactly what he’d meant.   
  
But that’s Tatsuya’s voice, the name only Tatsuya had ever called him; that’s Tatsuya’s face, Tatsuya’s body, whole, still eighteen, bigger and stronger than the last time Shuuzou had seen him in person. Back in LA, when had that been? The same as photographs, jerky video streams he’d had to trawl the internet for, frozen and fossilized in that moment. Shuuzou looks down at himself; he’s pretty sure he’s still twenty-six, but Tatsuya’s not looking at him strangely at all.   
  
If he’s here, in Tokyo, if Tatsuya’s dead, if he can't remember how he got here—is any of this real, or is he dead, too? Shuuzou’s not sure he wants to know the answer.   
  
“You don’t,” Tatsuya says, and Shuuzou had forgotten how open and transparent he’d always seemed to Tatsuya, how Tatsuya could always read him like the simplest of phrases in the largest size print.   
  
There’s so much he’s forgotten, so many ways he’s changed. So much he wants, right now, to know and to do and to feel.  
  
“Walk with me?” he says, finally, holding out his hand.   
  
Tatsuya accepts, his fingers cool and familiar. Shuuzou still doesn’t know anything, but this is enough to anchor him here for now.


	28. kagahimu, glass eating

There’s a lot Tatsuya used to hide from Taiga. The way he felt, what he did about those emotions, the ways they’d shaped how he acted towards Taiga, towards himself (and some of that was probably stuff he couldn’t see, because even when you spend as much time as Tatsuya thinking about yourself and your emotions, there are blind spots only clear from a distance). There’s a lot of intangible stuff like that, and then there’s the emotional glass eating, the signs Taiga had only begun to recognize because he’d been so used to hiding them on himself. Swollen lips, cut on the inside, the way Tatsuya would look for a second too long at the crack on a store window, at a broken bottle or the shattered cover of a phone booth on the street.   
  
There had been a time when they’d both known, a time when neither of them had said, but then Taiga had, because the relief is worth it. Going from trying not to think about Tatsuya to thinking about him and what he’d think about Taiga doing this to kissing his rough lips to imagining him with shards of glass stuck between him to, well, this, had been a lot of things. Amazing, really, when they make themselves wait a week and then dig through their own recycling, smashing bottles of beer and picking up brown and green and transparent shards off the labels they’re stuck to, tasting the residue at the bottom, the texture of the ring at the base against their tongues. A kiss, a transfer of shards against teeth and gums and lips, one mouth to another, the sounds of sucking on the curved shapes, unable to hold a flat plane. Perfect for the caverns between cheeks.   
  
This had started out as something else, but maybe it had always had to converge here. The two of them, Tatsuya’s apartment, miniature nicks on their fingertips from handling the shards, holding them between each other’s teeth, each other’s mouths warm and wet on flesh and glass.   
  
They don’t do it to excess, just a bottle or two, the one night a week; they don’t need to lean on it as much, use the crunch beneath their teeth to ground them. They don’t talk about that part, either, but they don’t need to, really; it’s passed under them like a train deep underground, now so far off they can’t hear it or feel it.   
  
“A little more?” Tatsuya says, and how can Taiga deny him (how ever, how when he so rarely asks for things like this)?   
  
There’s only a few shards left; Taiga picks them all up, inserts them between Tatsuya’s parted lips, and seals them inside with a kiss.


	29. murahimu, lost in the crowd

It is a point of contention at the time, who exactly had lost who. Both of them agree that one of them had gotten lost, and they’d gotten separated from each other in a crowd. However, though it’s obvious it’s Tatsuya who had gotten lost, given that Tokyo is fairly unfamiliar to him and it’s Atsushi’s hometown and this had been a neighborhood he’d spent a lot of time in during middle school, and the fact that in general Tatsuya’s sense of direction is horrible. Even if by sheer dumb luck he’d ended up in the right place, there’s no way he’d know it without Atsushi telling him, and Atsushi had been on his way to the right place when he’d turned around and, well.  
  
Tatsuya’s fairly hard to lose. He’s on the tall side (if still short), and people always look at him; still he’d managed it somehow, and it had taken several phone calls and about three quarters of an hour for them to find each other again. Tatsuya’s the one who had gotten lost, even if he’d had the nerve to ask Atsushi about how he’d gotten lost, and, well.  
  
“I didn’t get lost; you did,” Atsushi had pointed out, and Tatsuya had asked him if he’d wanted to hold hands.  
  
An impractical solution, and Tatsuya would probably figure out how to get lost anyway, but it’s not like he can think of anything better, so he hooks his pinky through Tatsuya’s, and no matter how Tatsuya strays or gets distracted by a window display or what looks like a distant street court Atsushi can always tug him along or notice the minute it stops and receive a fake apology (those times, he actually does grasp Tatsuya’s hand in his, small but sure; Tatsuya smiles up at him like he’d planned this and Atsushi kind of wants to punch something because of how infuriating Tatsuya can be).   
  
And this way, no one gets lost or left behind (even if it’s only Tatsuya who had been in danger of having that happen, anyway). The feeling of Tatsuya’s pinky hooked in his, even when they’re the only two people in the next block, is familiar, reassuring (not that Atsushi needs to be reassured that Tatsuya’s there, but it’s better than checking and not finding him). And when it’s one hand locked in the other—that can be nice, too, sometimes.


	30. murahimu, royalty lessons

All things considered, the only appropriate reaction in this situation is to stare. All things consist of this particularly attractive man revealing that he is, in fact, the minor noble in charge of teaching Atsushi how to behave as a royal (a prince, which he’s learned about approximately ten minutes ago from his very distant mother who is, in fact, the queen, and mother of the four older siblings he’s never met) , that this particularly attractive man had definitely been checking him out in the coffee shop last week and they had talked and this man had kissed him (so Atsushi had made it pretty obvious he’d wanted to; he hadn’t been the one to actually make that move).  
  
“You knew,” Atsushi says. “Last week."  
  
“Yes,” says the man (Himuro Tatsuya, if that’s really his name). “I was sent by your mother to check up on you.”  
  
“Did my mom tell you to kiss me?”  
  
“Nope. That was all me.”  
  
“I bet I could throw you in jail for that.”  
  
Himuro shrugs and grins, like he’s fearless, like he’s trying to get Atsushi to take the bait. He’s pretty sure kissing a duke or lord or whatever Himuro is isn’t the worst thing he could admit to his mother, especially if Himuro had been the one initiating it, but, well. Maybe if Himuro’s a terrible teacher.  
  
*  
  
“Don’t spill crumbs,” Himuro says.  
  
“I’ve seen you eat,” says Atsushi (he thinks, briefly, that this might be the ideal job for someone like Midorima, who enjoys instructing others on the proper way to do things and derives some satisfaction from seeing them present themselves to his standards).   
  
“I’m not a prince,” says Himuro. “Take dainty bites.”  
  
“My mouth can fit more,” says Atsushi.  
  
Himuro catches his eye, and Atsushi wonders if that sort of humor is strictly allowed by the palace. He’s not sure he wants to find out, or if he really cares either way.  
  
*  
  
“Why’d you kiss me?” Atsushi says.  
  
“I wanted to,” says Himuro. “I thought you wanted me to.”  
  
“Do you want to kiss me now?” says Atsushi.   
  
“I thought you were threatening to have me thrown in a dungeon for that,” says Himuro.  
  
Atsushi rolls his eyes. “Just answer my question.”  
  
“A prince does not roll his eyes.”  
  
“I don’t have to worry about impressing you,” says Atsushi.   
  
“Oh?” says Himuro.  
  
Atsushi leans across the table and kisses him, properly this time, not too long but with just enough emphasis. He leans back and folds his arms across his chest; Himuro’s eye is wide. He certainly looks impressed now, whether he needs to be or not.


	31. akamayu, treason

One of the many fine things about Chihiro is that he has taste. He doesn’t go for the gaudy and tacky, except at notable times to embarrass Seijuurou, but he prefers the understated elegance of the finest tea rooms, complemented with a cheap novel well bound in a hard cover, where he can sit on the edges and see but not be seen , dressed to impress Seijuurou but leave no impression on anyone else. He really is the finest spy in Seijuurou’s arsenal, adept at going unnoticed, blending in without being conspicuously absent, a blurred memory at best in anyone’s mind.   
  
“You’re late,” Chihiro remarks as Seijuurou sits down in the chair across from him.  
  
Seijuurou shrugs; there had been an obvious agent on his tail and he’d had to take two long ways around and he’s still only a minute late, which isn’t as bad as it could be. Perhaps not up to Chihiro’s standards, but Seijuurou could say a lot about the book Chihiro’s wearing or the sneer on his face as he stares down the society types he pretends to be above while enjoying the same services on the government’s check.  
  
“Enjoying your tea?”  
  
“Indeed,” says Chihiro, placing his book down and rolling up the sleeves of his dark grey suit. “You ought to try the chai.”  
  
Seijuurou nods; he’ll be having the extra fine sencha as usual but he’ll take that into consideration when recommending teas to others here. He trusts Chihiro’s opinions on most things, like the proper attire for committing high treason (though treason is such a vulgar word; Seijuurou would prefer to think of this as government assistance, perhaps not strictly in tune with the policy of a foreign body, but their laws hold no water here, and they’re at war--all's fair).   
  
Chihiro glances up, almost sharply but refraining himself at the last moment. “The ambassador.”  
  
Shit. The waitstaff has not made their way over yet, and Seijuurou reaches up to fist one hand in Chihiro’s shirt, pulling him across, strategically placing his head to cover Seijuurou’s from view.   
  
“Kiss me, Chihiro.”  
  
“Must you be so demanding?” says Chihiro.  
  
(Another fine thing about Chihiro is the way he does what he’s told, however begrudgingly he pretends it is. But Seijuurou can read the pleasure in his lips, the way Chihiro continues to move his tongue long after the ambassador must have looked away at the disgusting couple, or his eyes sliding over Chihiro’s head the way people’s always tend to do when Chihiro is in such extraordinary company—except for Seijuurou’s eyes, of course. But then, he’s always looking.)


	32. aomurakagahimu, food fight free for all

The recipe for chocolate cake looks fairly simple on paper, sugar and butter and chocolate and flour and all the usual things, despite Daiki’s protests that a peach cake would be easier and they could make both because they’re going to end up eating it all anyway, the latter of which is a very valid point. Atsushi keeps that thought to himself because it’s no use dredging up the argument just as it’s beginning to settle beneath them like sand at the bottom of the ocean. When it’s just him and Daiki, they can make peach cake. He likes chocolate just as well, and for now Tatsuya and Taiga can have what they want (and, even though Daiki claims he doesn’t, he’s going to end up eating some).   
  
The recipe isn’t the problem, and Atsushi supposes that finding out there’s only one cake pan in the middle of mixing the batter isn’t the problem, either (though he’s certainly not going to go out and buy one). Rather, it’s the four of them combined with the lack of room in Tatsuya’s kitchen, which is always kind of an issue when they’re here but sometimes Tatsuya says it’s cozy and Atsushi lets it slide. Sometimes all of them are here, though, and it’s fucking hot with the oven on while one layer of cake is cooling and the rest is in the oven and Atsushi’s been tasked with making the frosting and his elbows keep getting bumped. And even that’s just annoying until frosting starts getting everywhere.  
  
“What the fuck, Atsushi,” says Taiga, as a piece of frosting hits him in the face and hangs off the end of his eyebrow.  
  
“It’s not my fault Daiki bumped me.”  
  
“Not my fault,” says Daiki. “There’s not enough room.”  
  
“You’re not even cooking,” says Taiga.  
  
“You aren’t right now, either; wait for the damn timer.”  
  
On his way by, Tatsuya bumps into Atsushi and that may or may not be on purpose, but Atsushi’s taking no chances. He turns off the mixer, reaches into the frosting, and smears some on the side of Tatsuya’s face. Tatsuya makes a startled sort of sound, and he looks pretty cute l like that even though Atsushi knows they have less frosting with which to cover the cake (but they always have too much anyway, and he’s going to end up eating it some way, so off Tatsuya’s face like this isn’t any different from straight out of a bowl where it’s hardened up in the refrigerator.   
  
“Atsushi—you—” Taiga starts, because of course he’d take offense at that.  
  
“Want some?” says Atsushi.


	33. aokuro, strangers

Tetsu still hasn’t come back to school. Daiki doesn’t need Satsuki or Akashi to tell him that; it’s not like Tetsu’s here and more invisible than usual, hiding in dark corners. Daiki had always known how to look for him, where to turn his head and see Tetsu as if by some trick of light, a shock of pale hair and a small figure with the uniform done up correctly, a book or a basketball in his hand. The near invisible, near but not quite, places and things and ways Tetsu had of taking up space, of announcing his presence if you knew the right way to tilt your head, all the things that had remained constant in the background, that even after everything Daiki had continued to check, that he wan’t going completely off the deep end—it’s all gone, as if Tetsu had never even existed. As if Tetsu was a stranger who had passed through Teikou and away already.   
  
But Tetsu’s not a stranger; they’ve hurt each other in the most intimate of ways, refused to pull their punches (okay, it was Daiki who had struck first when Tetsu was just trying to help—Tetsu should have known, part of him says, but should he have been punished for not knowing, for knowing and trying anyway, for reaching out without flinching until he’d been blinded by the eclipse? Daiki already knows the answer to that one) and ended up here. Destruction, burn scars fading into their skin, except sometimes they wake up and feel it on them raw. And if Daiki were to see Tetsu, reappearing in the same spots, standing at the top of stairs under a certain slant of a sunbeam, carrying his schoolbag, it would hurt just as much as squinting into that light and looking for him when he knows he won’t find anything does. Were Daiki to find a stranger there instead, he’d just shrug and look away and forget, and he can’t even pretend to do that with Tetsu.  
  
The next time they meet, if it ever happens, if Tetsu’s not done with him and basketball and all of this (and if that’s possible, but Daiki’s not sure he knows Tetsu as well as he thought he had) it will be awkward, as if they don’t know anything about each other, the familiarity fallen away and rusted out. Like strangers, but with a history, visible, something they can never go back to. Worse than strangers, less than enemies.


	34. murahimu, podcast

“I don’t get why you like that podcast so much,” says Midorima. “It’s just a guy talking about basketball once a week.”  
  
“I don’t like it so much,” says Murasakibara.  
  
“You download it as soon as it comes out,” says Midorima. “You listen to it several times.”  
  
“You don’t like any podcast,” says Murasakibara.  
  
“I prefer reading."  
  
“Is that why your eyes are so bad?”  
  
Midorima doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, and if that means Murasakibara has time to listen to this week’s _Talking the Game_ again it’s no great loss. It’s nice to be able to close his eyes, stick his headphones in his ears, and lean back at his desk to listen to the host’s smooth voice, calm and charming, as he dives deep and slow into advanced statistics and speculation and things Murasakibara doesn’t usually care about or have the patience for. And just because he’s listening doesn’t mean he suddenly loves basketball. It just gives him something to do, new avenues of an overly familiar topic, something that may or may not be useful while he polishes off a box of pocky.  
  
Truthfully, Murasakibara doesn’t like podcasts all that much, either. Downloading new episodes is a pain; it’s like a serialized version of talk radio, which he’s always hated hearing. And the hosts always love to hear themselves talk, taking too long to tell a story he could have read in a few minutes elsewhere. This one’s different, though, the easy conversational tone and the valid insights, unfolded and explained in a way that works better than it would laid out on a page. Sure, there are no pictures and diagrams, but Murasakibara doesn’t think he needs any to understand this.   
  
(“Is it a voice message from your crush?” Murasakibara’s sister asks him.  
  
Murasakibara’s face does not get red; he does not have a crush. It’s just a podcast he’d rather listen to than do his homework or read something else; that’s all there is.)  
  
Murasakibara’s never going to be a basketball superfan. He’s never going to look up statistics, the implied homework that the host is clearly dangling in front of listeners, encouraging to go for. If there’s a trivia question that Murasakibara knows the answer to (or it’s easy to look up, just a few searches) he’ll send out an email to the provided address and wait. But the only satisfaction he gets from hearing his name (Atsushi in Tokyo again getting the correct answer, nothing quite so pleasing as the again) is only satisfaction from knowing he’s right—despite what Midorima or his sister might say, it’s nothing else.


	35. aokaga, fakeiversary

This food is pretty fucking good, even if it’s a little overpriced. Aomine can afford it, but he’d still really rather not pay, a thought that seems to fly out of his mind and settle over the next table, where the one waiter in the small restaurant gives a sappy smile to the couple sitting there.  
  
“It’s your wedding anniversary? Please, enjoy this creme brulee on the house.”  
  
Fuck, that creme brulee looks good (they were probably going to have room for dessert anyway), and there’s a lot of it, too. Aomine looks back at Kagami, who’s already almost polished off his sandwich. Aomine coughs, trying to be subtle.  
  
“What a coincidence that it’s their anniversary, too.”  
  
Kagami gives Aomine a funny look; Aomine tries to wink without scrunching up his face and then jerks his head in a completely non obvious way at the next table and their creme brulee. Kagami shrugs; he’s heard but he makes a face—and then reaches over to grab at Aomine’s hand. Aomine’s little remark had definitely caught the waiter’s attention, and he comes over to smile a little suspiciously at them.   
  
“I’m so glad we could be here, baby. I’m glad we can, uh, do away with traditional hallmarks of marriage like wedding rings and still have these.”  
  
The waiter still looks suspicious, and Aomine figures they have to play along. “Aw, babe.”  
  
He leans across the table to kiss Kagami, quickly, but that seems to almost do the trick (and, well, it’s not bad, what Aomine gets of it). “Could I have another water?”  
  
“Certainly,” says the waiter.  
  
Kagami’s kind of staring at Aomine, and his face keeps getting darker and darker red; his hand is still covering Aomine’s on the table.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Why’d you have to kiss me?” Kagami hisses.   
  
“Why’d you have to say we were married?”  
  
“You’re the one who said it was your anniversary.”  
  
“I could be married to someone else.”  
  
“I don’t think the free dessert works this way,” says Kagami. “Especially since you’d be spending your anniversary lunch with someone other than your spouse, apparently.”  
  
“Whatever,” says Aomine. “I had to sell the waiter on the premise.”  
  
He glances over; the waiter’s returning with more water, stopping to take a request from another table. Aomine leans over again and places his mouth on Kagami’s. This time, he tastes enough of the kiss to really get a fill, and it’s pretty goddamn nice.  
  
“Early anniversary, huh?” says one of the people from the next table as she gets up to head to the restroom.  
  
“It’s our second,” says Kagami.  
  
“Can’t believe I missed the first,” says Aomine, before Kagami kisses him this time.


	36. kikuro, bnha au

Kuroko doesn’t have a quirk, blending in on the outskirts and fringes, falling into the crowd, almost through the cracks until he’s noticed. And while it makes him ordinary, weak in comparison (having nothing extra to boost his strength, the absence of the baseline that Kise and the rest consider normal) it doesn’t mean he’s not special. Not when Kise looks at him, and he supposes some of the way he hovers and drags Kuroko into the spotlight when his heels are firmly planet in the ground is to—not negate that, make up for a lack of something he doesn’t need. It’s not something Kise thinks all that deeply about, as a topic, or even on a smaller level; his life is dissected enough.   
  
Maybe, if he had thought about it more, he would have realized sooner, but that slipperiness is part of it. Not quite being able to think about it deeply, the way Kuroko disappears when he, quirkless, should stick out among them. Because he’s not quirkless at all. Because that’s his quirk, disappearance. It’s not true invisibility, but that’s a paradox, stealthy; this is hiding in plain sight, a meta stealth of some kind. You don’t realize he’s there in the first place when he strikes; he’s got no superhero costume and no title, no way to announce himself. He’s both there and not, special in the way that he’s not special at all.  
  
“You’re amazing, Kurokocchi,” Kise had said, and he’d meant it then; he means it just as much now that they’ve all realized it. “Really amazing.”  
  
“Because I have a quirk, too?” says Kuroko.  
  
“No. You’d be amazing if you really didn’t have one, too,” says Kise, even though that’s impossible to quantify; he’s never known Kuroko without this particular quirk, even if he hadn’t thought it existed.  
  
Kise’s no romantic. There’s a lot to be said for small gestures, for reminding Kuroko all the time that he’s here and willing to pay attention, no matter how many other pairs of eyes slide over and around him that Kise’s eyes will focus on him. That he’s ready to listen to what Kuroko has to say, even if he takes a while to say it or doesn’t verbalize it at all, keeps it in subtle gestures, nearly invisible. That’s just his way of doing things, and Kise’s pretty adaptable after all—and he’d like to think, even if both of them had been perfectly ordinary, not extraordinarily so, they would have found each other anyway.


	37. kagahimu, morning

There’s no reason for Taiga to be awake this early. The dim light outside is still grey, and even when the sun rises it won’t be shining straight through the bedroom window. He doesn’t have to pee and he’s not thirsty; he’s not especially hungry either. Tatsuya’s cuddled against him, but he hadn’t bumped into Taiga to wake him up, and the remnants of Taiga’s dream are filtering away. He remembers a large theater, getting lost trying to find the entrance, bumping up against Tatsuya, Tatsuya’s gentle smile. Right now his face is more neutral, but not the careful guarded mask of neutral he always tries to present. Just itself, as it is. Taiga pushes Tatsuya’s bangs away to look at his forehead, his other eye, and kisses his eyebrow.  
  
Tatsuya sighs, sliding a little farther under the cover and pulling on the end of Taiga’s shirt. He’s so goddamn cute like this, still most of the way asleep and all of him given over to instinct and unaware reactions. Taiga wants to wake him up, though, talk with him and kiss him properly, but yesterday had been a long and rough day for him at work; dinner had been quiet and by the time Taiga had gotten back from training Tatsuya had been sound asleep. Like he is now, still; he’s really that tired (the black smudges under his eyes, like bruises of smeared makeup, leer at Taiga and he wants to kiss them away).   
  
Tatsuya mumbles something unintelligible, closer to a jumble of syllables than any recognizable words. Taiga kisses the tip of his nose, then up the bridge to the middle of his forehead; Tatsuya stirs against him. They have five minutes until the alarm, five hopefully extra minutes with which to play. Taiga kisses Tatsuya on the mouth, gentle and quiet, hopefully not yanking him out of a pleasant dream.  
  
“Oh,” Tatsuya says when Taiga pulls back. “Taiga.”  
  
“Good morning,” Taiga says, pecking Tatsuya’s cheek and then leaning over to brush his lips across Tatsuya’s earlobe.   
  
Tatsuya laughs at the contact, kissing Taiga’s neck and digging the short, blunt ends of his nails into Taiga’s side. “Morning.”  
  
Taiga’s hand is stroking patterns and rhythms against Tatsuya’s spine; he can feel the vibration of Tatsuya’s sigh reverberating, the cadence of his breathing, the quiet way he exhales, and then all of Taiga’s attention is taken away by the sure smile Tatsuya gives him. He wants to hold that in his hand, keep it in his pocket; he wants to look at it until the alarm clock dies from ringing forever. But he’ll let it end as Tatsuya moves in to kiss him again.


	38. kikasa, mask

Kise is easy to pin down until he’s not, but then he’s hard to pin down until he’s easy all over again, which he’d probably try to sell as part of his charm (but then, to him isn’t everything?) if Kasamatsu were to ever bring it up to him. He’s got layers, but at the bottom he’s just the same as Kasamatsu, just another boy who loves basketball in that kind of desperate way, who makes mistakes and grows with his mind and body not quite in synchronicity yet.   
  
It’s easy to see him the way you want to, to project yourself or the things you want to see in him. An outer layer of pretty, perfect, charming; the layer below that of a kid coasting by on his personality without working hard enough, entitled and lazy. He is some of each of those, sometimes, but it’s not like they’re floating at his surface with nothing underneath but hot air. There is something under that, if you look and Kise lets you see, a jumble of things copied from other people, mannerisms and ways of relating, emotions that aren’t the muted happy perky or competitive he lets rise up, anger and annoyance and a smugness that’s not so far below but runs deeper, a willingness to rub things in people’s faces. Another mask, though, but Kasamatsu’s patient enough to watch that jumble settle down and see what is, for lack of a better word, the real Kise.  
  
The light in his heart, the fight, the beauty that puts the outer layer to shame. The desire, grounded and in opposition to the flighty shallows of the rest of him. Deep down, the singular focus, the desire to win, the love of basketball interwoven like braided hair from scalp to tip. A beautiful glow, fierce like something bioluminescent at the bottom of the sea, something Kasamatsu can’t look away from. It’s not going to hurt his eyes to look at, though, and it’s an absolute privilege to be able to see all of that in Kise.   
  
Kise might call this part of his charm, but it’s not nearly so thin as that, not designed to lure people in, not designed to be seen at all. Kasamatsu’s already hooked, already too far gone, by the time he heads toward the center, but that’s okay. Even if Kise isn’t as gone on him, even if this is only temporary, and when this started Kasamatsu would have said it was. Except Kise’s a hell of a lot more committed than he sees, a hell of a lot more stubborn, too—so Kasamatsu gets the feeling it won’t be.


	39. akamayu, after last game

Seijuurou probably knows he’s here. Okay, he definitely knows Chihiro’s here; it had been in the way he’d laughed on the phone when he’d told Chihiro he would be coming in from Kyoto, the way he’d asked Chihiro if he’d come to the game like he’d already known the answer, so Chihiro didn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing a no if Seijuurou was so damn sure about everything. And, well, no would have been the answer, regardless of what Chihiro ended up doing, because he can’t just let Seijuurou think he’s going to drop everything, all of his college stuff and his job, just to watch a damn basketball game because Seijuurou’s in it.   
  
He’d just happened to be free today; that’s all. And he’d come alone, because he’s not going to let anyone know he’s going to see his high school classmate. Who is also his boyfriend. Who is definitely going to meet him for a date afterwards, or at least he’d suggested as much, which for someone like Seijuurou is an order to be there. Chihiro resents that a little, but it also means Seijuurou’s paying, so he won’t say no to that.   
  
*  
  
“Did you enjoy the game?” says Seijuurou.  
  
The restaurant is fairly quiet, crowded but sedate, and somehow even though it had seemed like half the goddamn city had come out to see this stupid game no one here is asking Seijuurou for his autograph. (Chihiro’s not sure if he’d be revolted or if he’d just laugh about it if it happened.)  
  
“Who says I went?”  
  
Seijuurou smiles and sips his water, and Chihiro wants to grind his teeth. He does not; he shrugs instead.   
  
“It was fine. Too offense-heavy. I’m surprised you didn’t focus on D for a team like that.”  
  
“The best defense is a good offense,” says Seijuurou.   
  
“Not enough defensive players at your disposal?” says Chihiro.  
  
Seijuurou doesn't take the bait, and that’s no fun. Not until his knuckles bump the end of Chihiro’s knee under the table, and by the time Chihiro’s hand reaches over to capture them they’re gone. Chihiro checks his watch; they’ve been here long enough. They’re together so rarely, and he has no particular desire to spend their time, as it winds down, in a restaurant with other people all around them.   
  
“Could I have the check?” Seijuurou asks as the waiter comes around again.  
  
Chihiro is rarely grateful for Seijuurou’s tendency to act like he can read minds, but it does come in handy some of the time. Not very often, though.


	40. momoriko, piercing

They come in early on Saturday, before the shop opens and while Satsuki’s coworkers are all getting set up. There’s a room near the back, very clean and bright, not really fitting Riko’s idea of dark corners and grunge in a place like this, but she doesn’t say anything. Unfortunately, Satsuki has a tendency to follow her thought patterns; when Riko turns to look at her she’s smiling in just that way.  
  
“You know, it’s a lot easier to see what you’re doing with more light. And for hygiene and liability reasons, well. We keep it clean.”  
  
Riko flushes. “I wasn’t suggesting—”  
  
“Of course not; you didn’t say anything,” says Satsuki. “Now take off your shirt.”  
  
Okay, Riko knows she has to in order to do this part but it still feels a little weird, a little like the plot of a porno, to get topless in a piercing parlor with her girlfriend and a few sharp objects (yeah, maybe she’s got a dirty mind, but she’s pretty sure Satsuki’s thinking something too, the way she looks at her—the way she always looks at Riko, with an undisguised interest that had taken a little bit of getting used to). Okay, Satsuki’s definitely thinking something a little dirty when Riko flinches back at the cold disinfectant Satsuki applies to her nipples and the area around them, and she’s definitely spending a little bit too long on that (Riko’s gotten her ears pierced already; she’s pretty sure less than that is a little adequate).  
  
“Nice and clean,” Satsuki murmurs. “Here comes the hard part.”  
  
The piercing gun goes through each one quickly, before Riko has a chance to react as it happens. She can definitely feel it, though; her skin’s awfully sensitive there and, oh. She looks down, and whoa, that looks hot. Like, really hot, like better than she’d imagined. And Satsuki’s looking awfully pleased with herself and with the way it had turned out, and Riko will allow that she should be.  
  
“You know,” Satsuki says. “We could throw in a free tattoo.”  
  
“I’m not ready for that,” says Riko. “And you’re already giving me the employee discount.”  
  
“Not like I could use it on anyone else,” says Satsuki. “I have all I need for now, and Dai-chan’s scared of needles.”  
  
“Gee, thanks,” says Riko (though she knows how Satsuki means it).  
  
Satsuki leans in and ksisses her, fingertips brushing the bottoms of her breasts.


	41. akamido/aomido, getting over

It is beginning to fade, Midorima thinks, like the moon bleeding over the edge of the horizon towards disappearance, glowing bright orange and large in the sky before it goes. Aomine could probably think of a better comparison, but this isn’t something he talks about with Aomine, lodged in the back of his throat if he ever feels like he wants to or should. Something of their shared past, but really of Midorima’s, all the time and care he’d sunk into a relationship destined to sink itself. Not really a relationship at all, but encased inside of him. The aches he still feels, waking up and thinking about a dream he’d had, playing shogi with Akashi. Waking up and thinking about Aomine beside him, Aomine and his own doomed past, and then feeling guilty that he only thinks about Akashi when he has a piece of toast Aomine had made for him in his mouth.   
  
He used to think that he would be forever sunk into the trappings of old love, something so romantically doomed as him and Akashi. Something that never could have worked, a vow he had made to beat Akashi, to be the first to show him defeat, a vow he could not keep, a victory that had meant so much less when it had come. A victory he had not meant as that, but was not nearly so much as he had built it up to be, but perhaps that had been the middle of the end. The beginning coming earlier, how much earlier? Midorima hadn’t bene prepared to let it go, but it has loosened his clutches on him and he has to work to keep it close.   
  
He does not have the energy that he is willing to devote to it any longer, to those long-held feelings that have taken root in him but are now withering and dying. Wonderful, terrible, neither, both. Sometimes Aomine looks at him and Midorima wonders if he sees that. He doesn’t feel quite as bad for placing Aomine in the middle (because Aomine could choose to leave, to get out of this; Midorima’s given him room) as he does for thinking about Akashi when Aomine’s there.   
  
“I know,” Aomine says, and he does, but he sounds as tired of every bit of this as Midorima feels.   
  
Midorima wakes up the next morning in Aomine’s arms, thinking only of him, and it doesn’t feel bad at all.


	42. nijihimu, clingy spirits

Shuuzou’s always been able to see the things that cling. The ghosts, spirits dependent on their hosts, parasites that haunt memories, like toilet paper at the bottom of your shoe. The first thing he notices about Tatsuya, after that gorgeous face and the way he fights, is how much is clinging to him. How he’s covered in it, wisps wrapping around his arms, stuck to his knees, hanging off his necklace (so much that Shuuzou can only guess at the necklace's true shape, whatever actually hangs from it). Everything he’s ever known relating to his powers and every fiber of his common sense are telling him not to get too close. To stay away from someone like this.   
  
But he’s pretty, but he fights, but he;s charming and helpful—people have died for shittier reasons than that, ignoring every warning; Shuuzou doesn’t need to be reminded. He doesn’t think he’s different, special. But it’s just as obvious that Tatsuya means him no harm. He’s not an evil spirit himself, just tangled up and weighed down, and Shuuzou wants to help him exorcize his demons.  
  
(People like Tatsuya don’t want help; they don’t want to know anyone knows how haunted and troubled they are. Shuuzou doesn’t give a fuck.)  
  
The demons don’t crawl onto Shuuzou; Shuuzou’s ahd too much experience with demons who try to spawn and spread, too much experience running from his own all night on a stolen motorbike out to the burbs and beyond. Too young for all of this; Tatsuya’s still too young for what he has. The hissing things on the necklace, snapping at his fingers before he gets near. They won’t draw blood; if he ignores them they’ll shrink back and he can kiss Tatsuya, wind his fingers through the ends of Tatsuya’s hair, and push his belief in Tatsuya’s capability, Tatsuya’s happiness, forward. It’s trickier than that, of course; it might even be beyond what Shuuzou can do for him right now; these ghosts might have buried their thorns and roots in too far, so far only Tatsuya can cast them out, as one would do with parts of one’s self. Because they are part of him, now, his self-image, the way he moves, a weight he is used to carrying all the time. A weight he shouldn’t have to carry, whatever the catalyst.   
  
The spirits are thick over Tatsuya’s hand, but Shuuzou reaches for his fingers and locks them together tight, squishing whatever dares to pass between them. Tatsuya's stronger than that; they’re stronger than that.


	43. aomomo, third wheel kuroko

Kuroko would consider himself a fairly strong man. He’s physically capable, at least; his mental capacity is fine. There’s a lot he can deal with, a lot of bullshit life throws at him that he can figure out. Aomine and Momoi, or more specifically their romantic relationship, really aren’t in that category, not without a nice bottle of strong liquor.  
  
It’s not that Kuroko harbors any feelings for Momoi, any regret over not taking a particular chance, over missing out on dating her. He’s never wanted that; even if he had it had been fairly obvious to him that her feelings weren’t from a deep place, just something to do with excess energy, a safe investment because the likelihood of him reciprocating had been fairly small. It hadn’t really been taking advantage; he’d taken advantage of the situation as much as she had, anyway. He just hadn’t expected the nature of her and Aomine’s friendship to suddenly give way to romance, when they’d always seemed more like siblings, their denials always coming from an honest place.   
  
Maybe they had at the time, but Kuroko’s still used to that denial as the way things are. And while he’s used to Aomine and Momoi being volatile with each other, taking each other for granted and having terrible fights that they drag out too long and drag Kuroko into the middle of, he’s not used to something like this, where one minute they’re snipping at each other and the next Momoi’s hand is at the top of Aomine’s leg and their tongues are shoved down each other’s throat.   
  
Kagami had suggested alcohol as a joke, but Kuroko had been quite serious and had taken the suggestion as such. It’s not a bad way to deal with it, sipping from a bottle of bourbon when all three of them are in the back of a cab and somehow Kurok ohad been convinced to play third wheel on one of their dates (most of the time it involves one of them inviting him along and the other showing up, too, planned or not). He’s got a fairly low tolerance for that stuff, so a bottle lasts him a good while, a couple of weeks. And if he makes Aomine pay for it sometimes, that’s only because it’s Aomine’s fault he’s so hard for Momoi to deal with and they’re both difficult for Kuroko.  
  
“It’s Satsuki’s fault, too,” says Aomine, trying to pull her close for a kiss.  
  
She’s gotten good at ducking out of the way, and Aomine dips down to touch his lips to the air. She smirks at him, and Kuroko rummages in his bag. He can’t get drunk fast enough.


	44. aokise, just play

Bold declarations are easy, even when you have to make them to your idol across the court. They’re easy compared to actually following through, because Kise doesn’t know basketball without admiring Aomine, without idolizing him and holding him up as the peak, the ideal to be achieved. He’s not the only great one, but he’s the only one worth emulating that much, even if that’s backed Kise into this corner where he can’t beat Aomine because he’s so focused on catching up. Maybe the only one who can beat Aomine is Aomine, but Kise’s not there yet; he can’t be the one to beat him.   
  
In practice, he still thinks about Aomine a lot, the way he used to smile and the way he smiles now, the motion of his fingers on the ball as he dribbles, a fadeaway that no one could have made but he did, almost horizontal falling backwards. Kise has to grow, to change, to not just want that, to not want to be everything Aomine is. That’s not going to make Aomine see him like that, anyway; Aomine wants an equal but he doesn’t want an equivalent. He wants someone like Kuroko, only not really; Kise is just standing in that shadow. Kuroko’s his own shadow.   
  
Kise would like to think that he’s big enough to cast a light like that, but he’s not ready like this, still following behind Aomine. It’s difficult, having to let go of wanting something to achieve it, but he’s never wanted anything this much. It should be easy to move on, to focus on something better, but he doesn’t want to lose ground, lose where he is.   
  
“Whatever you’re worried about, just play,” Kasamatsu says, and Kise wonders how transparent he must be in this aspect.  
  
He takes the pass from Kobori, feels it in his hands, and lets it go, trying not to think about Aomine, just the way his own muscles are working in this moment. Just the plays they’re supposed to be running, where his teammates are. Kaijou basketball, separately. It doesn’t work; he still thinks of a particular shot he’d watched Aomine do, a thousand variations, Aomine’s never the same and Kise’s always the same.   
  
“Let’s try it again,” he says. “Sorry.”  
  
Again the ball comes to Kise; this time he passes it, drives in, lets the ball come back and doesn’t think. He dunks the ball more like Kobori, something Aomine probably wouldn’t do, but he’s not going to let himself waste time thinking about doing things the way Aomine has or would or wouldn’t. That’s a promise he’s going to force himself to keep until they’re standing on the same level, until Aomine’s been forced to see him as he is.


	45. murahimu/kisehimu, crush them

The way Tatsuya is, the way he plays, he won’t give anyone else much credit. IF there’s anything Atsushi had learned from playing with him it’s that basketball is a team sport, that you can sense the weaker links and the links who aren’t carrying enough, the links who are carrying too much. You have to stop people like him from taking on too much and becoming entirely useless, and you have be willing to call your teammates out on their bullshit. The way Tatsuya had with him, the way Atsushi had had to do with Tatsuya, even when they were dating.  
  
They’re not dating anymore, but that’s the result of a lot of things. Bad decisions both of them had made, Tatsuya refusing to leap ahead but complaining of falling behind, staying in college a little bit too long, in Atsushi’s opinion. What could he learn there? He doesn’t need a degree to play basketball; there’s enough money to satisfy his parents; at the end of the day college championships (not that he’d won one) don’t really matter. But at that point it hadn’t been as much of Atsushi’s business, so that is what it is.   
  
It’s not just that, that they’re not dating, that they haven’t played together since high school and several scattered all star games. It’s just that Atsushi isn’t the only one who’d learned something from Tatsuya all the way back in Akita, back then. Tatsuya’s just the one who has the nerve to pretend it hadn’t had anything to do with Atsushi at all, that it’s all him on his own, tweaking his own moves to fit in with his newest teammate. Also his newest boyfriend, though that’s a little bit different than Tatsuya and Atsushi. Like how Atsushi would have liked to think that Tatsuya would have followed him to Los Angeles or Miami if they were still dating, but Tatsuya had been traded, by luck, to the Warriors. He wouldn’t have chosen it, to put himself with someone who plays like him but so much better. Unlimited. They don’t play a complementary game, and maybe it’s a little bit of bitterness and holding on too long that makes Atsushi feel a little bit smug about it, but hey. It’s not like Tatsuya’s not being an ass about it, too, playing with Kise on the other wing like that, leaving him for all the ways Kise refuses to pull his punches, but Tatsuya’s always been a masochist.   
  
It doesn’t make Atsushi look forward to playing the Warriors all that much, but it makes him look forward to crushing them under his heel.


	46. murahimu, violin

The school keeps spare instruments in the back of the orchestra room. Liu is the only person Murasakibara knows who uses them, practicing the cello the way his parents had ingrained it into him at least an hour a day, the weight of expectations on the eldest child (by the time Murasakibara had come around his parents hadn’t had any expectations left, and whether that’s a burden or lack thereof Murasakibara doesn’t really care). At least, Liu’s the only one until Murasakibara passes by and catches Himuro there.  
  
The sound of him playing the violin is ordinary, at least in Murasakibara’s untrained ears, but he doesn’t really notice that (not that he has any idea what Himuro’s playing). It’s the way it looks, the violin tucked under Himuro’s chin, one hand moving the bow with all the learned grace that Himuro uses to handle a basketball, the other hand moving up and down the strings, gripping the violin’s neck. Like an elegant sort of choking, Murasakibara thinks, the way his fingers press and tremble, sliding up and down in positions he somehow remembers from somewhere (or maybe he’s just bullshitting the whole thing, making it up as he goes along).   
  
Himuro doesn’t seem to notice him, but Murasakibara doesn’t leave until he thinks Himuro should be done already (it’s weird to see him do the same thing with something other than basketball, although it makes sense if Murasakibara thinks about it). The tune does not remain in his head, but he falls asleep thinking about those fingers on his wrist.  
  
“You play violin,” he says the next day at lunch.  
  
Himuro pauses, rice falling from his chopsticks, the picture of a false startling. “You saw me.”  
  
Murasakibara shrugs. “You should do it more.”  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Himuro.  
  
Murasakibara hadn’t thought he’d been that obvious, but maybe Himuro had seen him the whole time, or at least the second and third, alone in the music room, his fingers moving up and down the strings all over again. He presses the same way against Murasakibara’s hip, thigh, the inside of his wrist, the hell of his hand.   
  
“Like that, Atsushi?”  
  
“Yes,” says Murasakibara, and kisses him, waiting for Himuro’s fingers to press in patterns again, that could be nonsense but it’s all the same to him.   
  
Sometimes now Himuro invites him to watch; Murasakibara never commits to it. But he’s usually there, his eyes focused on Himuro’s fingers as he plays the same few pieces again, the motions still small, singular, fascinating.


	47. murahimu, switchblade

“You’re a stereotype,” Murasakibara says, tucking his own switchblade into his hair; it looks enough like a pin and it’s not very trigger-happy.   
  
Himuro pauses, his blade tucked almost all the way into his boot. “I can afford to be.”  
  
It’s true; he can get away with a lot by being pretty. Being flirtations, pretending to be more than he is, less of a stereotype, and of course he’s so charming they’ll forget the usual hiding places and he’ll get away with everything. He’d explained it as much to Murasakibara before but Murasakibara had wondered how much of that itself had been the usual bullshit, the kind of excuse he makes up as he goes along like the way he talks to his superiors where Murasakibara thinks he’s going to lose a finger or a whole hand someday.   
  
His hands are beautiful, and for now they’re intact.  
  
“It takes too long to get it out from there, anyway,” says Murasakibara.  
  
“If I were as tall as you it would,” says Himuro.   
  
Murasakibara rolls his eyes, because that’s the only response to that, really. His appearance doesn’t lend itself well to the most covert of operations, but when you’re the youngest child of the don you aren’t going to have too many of those anyway. Too many times before his parents had hired Himuro he’d been held as bait, ransom. He can take care of himself now, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to, someone who’s so memorably pretty but can lie his way in and out of anything.   
  
“And then I couldn’t do this,” says Himuro, neatly fisting his hand into the front of Murasakibara’s shirt and pulling him into a quick kiss.   
  
“So demanding,” says Murasakibara.  
  
Himuro shrugs, a nonverbal acknowledgement with a tacked on follow up that Murasakibara likes it, too. He doesn’t dislike it, but he’s not going to say it. It’s better to dig his hands into his pants pockets and leave the markings on the front of his shirt, the wrinkles where his fingers had dug in. He’ll have to present himself better later, or get yelled at (or have Himuro get yelled at) by someone higher up, about being presentable all over again. Murasakibara sighs.  
  
“You’d better get it out quick if you need to.”  
  
“Of course,” says Himuro. “You don’t need to worry.”  
  
“I wasn’t worried. I’m just saying,” says Murasakibara.


	48. aokise, nerve

Kise strikes with sharp edges. They feel blunt at first but they dig in, like scraping your finger on the edge of a textbook and getting a paper cut, a flap of skin that stings without stopping. Kise fights fucking dirty, but he always has. His existence is a gamebreaker, and Aomine had just been too much of an idiot to think it could ever happen to him. It had happened to Haizaki, but he needed replacing; he was easily surpassed. And, well, Aomine had hurt Kise. A lot, intentionally and not.  
  
Like back in middle school when he’d lashed out at almost everyone; Satsuki and Tetsu had lashed out back at him in their own ways, and they’d really been the intended targets, the ones he wanted to drag out with him. Akashi hadn’t put up with too much shit; everyone else is in another sphere by now, except for Kise. Kise had been right there, right next to him, looking up at him, and Aomine had tried to throw that all away. The burden of being looked up to when you’re at a peak you hate being on, that you keep getting dizzy staring over. A place you think he can’t reach. Aomine had hurt Kise, sure, back then, after that, even.  
  
Aomine hadn’t known Kise had been saving up his grudges; Aomine hadn’t thought Kise had meant it when he’d said he’d quit admiring him. (He’s pretty conceited, but not conceited enough to say that it’s impossible for anyone to stop admiring him, just that for Kise, well, isn’t that kind of impossible?) He hadn’t thought Kise would ever stop chasing him, because Kise hadn’t known any other way to do basketball, except he’d done it, severed half the ties that had still bound him and found himself.  
  
At the time, it had been easy to think they could tie each other up again, that Aomine could reach across and pull Kise into his arms and kiss him and say come with me, and have Kise say yes, of course. Naive, foolish, of course, but it had made perfect sense. Separate, grow stronger, return, see each other properly, not what they want to see, not just sloppy middle school kisses and sloppier feelings—now, it’s clear, they can’t. Not if Kise is willing to hurt, to pull Aomine close just to sink his claws in, barbs at the end that hurt like bee stings, only when Kise pulls away again, tearing out Aomine’s skin. Maybe Aomine shouldn’t have made his own assumptions, but he’d like to think he’d stopped deserving this shit a long time ago.


	49. aokise, mean

Ryouta knows what he’s doing is mean and low, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to do it, not going to exploit every single little advantage he has, pull out all the stops. It’s the NBA finals; either way this ends they’re not going to have a real game against each other for months (not that one on ones aren’t just as good or better, but Ryouta would be lying if he said the attention, the international spotlight, didn’t mean a thing to him, and Daiki would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy watching Ryouta bask in that spotlight, bathing in it like a giant fucking jacuzzi washing all over him).   
  
Because Ryouta's watched him for years, imitated him as long as he’s been playing basketball, and Daiki would also be lying if he said that didn’t do a lot for his ego, that someone like Ryouta, pretty and talented who’s come this far, who could copy anyone he wanted to, who could learn a new stance but naturally takes Daiki’s across the court or on his own, who still looks to him, copies new moves from him even though he has to put in some effort to get there. But because Ryouta’s watched for years, copied for years, he knows everything. And just because he defaults to playing like Daiki, because he could play like Daiki half-asleep with two broken wrists doesn’t mean he’s always going to play like Daiki.  
  
Because he knows Daiki’s strengths; he knows Daiki’s weaknesses. He doesn’t have much of an analytical mind, but he thinks about it well enough to deconstruct Daiki’s game and he knows the game well enough to pinpoint all the little things and just go with it. He knows who had beaten Daiki in one way or another, and he can take those, too, make them his own, instead of relying on the same trick whip out a dozen at once. Best him on offense, best him in defense, block his passing lanes and strike in the air. Ryouta doesn’t always win; Daiki’s always got a way out but that doesn’t always work.   
  
But Ryouta’s holding him under a microscope, dissecting and refining his game right in front of him, adding random shit until it’s morphed into his own, beautiful and terrible and the most fun thing to play against maybe ever. Mean, cruel, throwing things back in Daiki’s face. But all’s fair in love and war, and they love each other and they love basketball, so it’s all kind of working out (well, it will if the Cavs win the finals, anyway).


	50. akakuro, mob au

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gets pretty gory a bit

”Will you stay with me?” Kuroko says.  
  
”Yes."  
  
”You won't abandon me?” A trick question; someone somewhere is probably recording it, but no one ever said Akashi couldn’t take the bait.  
  
“If I do, you can kill me."  
  
”I actually would kill you.” (So they’re both implicated here, now, good.)  
  
“Knowing you, I don't doubt that for a moment. I’m prepared for that. This is a confession of love, after all,” says Akashi.  
  
Because love, Kuroko’s love, is a serious thing to be given, to have left in his care. Not that Akashi is incapable, even by Kuroko’s mercurial and demanding standards. Akashi is always capable, capable of anything, in absolute terms. That doesn’t mean that Kuroko won’t blame Akashi for his own misgivings and missteps, but that’s a price Akashi’s willing to pay. In blood, yes, but he has written many covenants in blood—even if it’s rarely his that’s actually on the line, it’s still the way their world works.   
  
“Come and kiss me,” Akashi says.  
  
Kuroko accepts the order, comes and kisses him.  
  
*  
  
Tetsuya should have known. Should have known the twists and pitfalls in Seijuruou’s words, the oath that keeps them together, the way Seijuurou turns away, claims to be absolute but refuses to let Tetsuya in. Two-faced, five-faced, it doesn’t matter. Absolute, but not absolutely Tetsuya’s, so does it really matter?   
  
Of course it does; of course it triggers the clause that Seijuurou had agreed to, the one he had brought up, knowing its seriousness in full. Of course, and yet, Tetsuya doesn’t want to do it. He’s killed before, but taking Seijuurou from this world, taking away all of the parts of him that will never be Tetsuya’s, but those come with all of the parts Tetsuya had loved. Still loves, as uncomfortable as he is with that truth. And Seijuurou knows full well what to expect; he can’t take Tetsuya for this much of a fool, can he? Would it not be more cruel to leave him, thinking he will or should be killed?  
  
Except it’s not about cruelty; it’s not about revenge. It’s about an oath, that Tetsuya will keep even if Seijuurou will. Even though, when he comes into Seijuurou’s office, Seijuurou dismisses his bodyguard as usual and Tetsuya can see it in his eyes. He does not want to give Seijuurou the satisfaction—but he’d rather not someone else get to it, either. This is his kill to make, and this is what Tetsuya wants, too. If it coincides with what Seijuurou wants, too, then that’s a crueler twist (couldn’t it have been earlier, something happier?) but it’s a twist he makes, the knife in Seijuurou’s gut, shredding his organs. The smell, the stickiness of blood, Seijuurou’s eyes.


	51. akamibu, space au

“That’s an awfully large missile,” says Nebuya.  
  
“The Akashi crew thought it might come in handy so they equipped ups,” says Mibuchi, shrugging and trying not to smile when he says the name.  
  
“You mean your boyfriend,” says Nebuya.  
  
Mibuchi sighs. “Not my boyfriend, Eikichi.”  
  
“Right, whatever,” says Nebuya. “Which is why they’ve requested to dock when we reach the next station, of course, to check out a missile. Because an organization like Akashi totally has the time and resources for a smaller ship like ours, and a missile they thought would come in handy.”  
  
Mibuchi shrugs. “They’re just being diligent, Eikichi. You read too much into things, and besides, the Rakuzan isn’t exactly without prestige.”  
  
Nebuya sighs, and Mibuchi places the data pad back in his bag. Yes, it’s an overly large missile for fighting pirates and smugglers on their legitimate cargo ship, but there’s no such thing as overly prepared when you’re this far into deep space, even if your trajectory is headed in a loop back into the solar system after you hit the outpost and even when you have several reserves of fuel tanks to make three times the entire journey without stopping once.  
  
*  
  
They make it safely to the next station, only a few small exchanges of goods but a necessary stop to stock up on supplies and make adjustments, take care of whatever minor issues pop up along the way and only make themselves clear when they’re headed out to space. They haven’t had to fire the big gun yet, but Akashi docks for inspection as surely as he’s promised. Nebuya coughs at Mibuchi and Hayama’s been making unveiled remarks all morning, but Mibuchi doesn’t care.  
  
“Sei-chan, it's so good to see you!”  
  
“And you as well, Reo. Kotarou, Eikichi.”  
  
Akashi waves at his assistants, sending them off to do a preliminary inspection. “Of course, I’ll take the time to inspect it myself. But for now…”  
  
“Of course,” says Mibuchi, feeling very validated in his choice to restock the tea in his quarters so he can brew a pot for them.  
  
*  
  
“For someone who isn’t your boyfriend, that looked an awful lot like a date,” says Nebuya.  
  
“It wasn’t a date,” says Mibuchi. “We were discussing business matters.”  
  
“Like more missiles Akashi’s going to give us and inspect himself for free?”  
  
Mibuchi shrugs. “I’m the captain. I’m allowed to tell you at my discretion.”  
  
“Whatever,” says Nebuya. “Keep it professional.”


	52. kagahimu, basketball in the rain

The sky is grey and the humidity is bearing down by the time they make it out the door in the morning. It’s still early, not even half past nine, but they’d been planning for even earlier, caught up in each other and making breakfast and what is certainly not a waste of time but still feels like it had vanished when they were going to play basketball all day. The showers today are supposed to be scattered, and Tatsuya hopes they’re scattered over some other part of the city and they somehow skip this court, or this area. The weather, unfortunately, has other ideas, and soon enough the clouds are too saturated and the pressure’s too much and the skies open.  
  
It starts slow, but that only lasts a few seconds at best, drops visible against the pavement, Tatsuya’s shot going off, and as it falls through the hoop the rain’s picking up and by the time they make it down to the other side of the court the ground is completely dark, covered in rain; they can hear it running down the gutters and falling through the leaves on the trees, faster, faster.   
  
“We can still play,” Tatsuya says.  
  
“We could try,” says Taiga, doubt in his voice.   
  
Tatsuya steals the ball from him where he’s standing, totally cheating, but he’s not going to wait for Taiga to catch him. HE’s rising into a jumper when Taiga catches him, pulling him out of the air as his shot flies wide, hitting against the backboard and bouncing back.  
  
“Hey,” says Tatsuya, but he can’t make his voice go hard and stern, not when Taiga’s looking at him like that with his hair sticking to his forehead, not when Taiga’s holding him like this, like it’s no effort at all, not when his wet shirt is sticking to his skin and Tatsuya doesn’t have to imagine at all to see the outlines of his biceps. Taiga tilts his head up, pressing a kiss to Tatsuya’s cheek.  
  
“You’re it.”  
  
“What is this, tag?” Tatsuya says, and then he manages to catch a ducking Taiga on the side of his jaw.  
  
“If you want it to be,” says Taiga, right before he kisses Tatsuya’s mouth.  
  
They’re drenched by now; they’re both going to need a long time to dry up when they get back indoors; it's still humid and sticky and gross and it’s almost uncomfortable staying this close to each other, but Tatsuya can’t get enough.


	53. aokise, reciprocity

Kise loves him. Aomine doesn’t need Kise to tell it to him, though he’s already said it in different words. In the way he looks at him, the way he wants to pull himself up to Aomine’s level, the things he says, wanting that, being Aomine to beat him, admiring or not. It’s like he’s a planet and Kise is his moon, shining in the spotlight in his sky, circling him, inside his gravitational pull. It goes that one way, until it doesn’t, until Aomine’s feelings change from a mixture of being flattered and validated, taking Kise for granted, considering him a friend or at least an important acquaintance, to this. Reciprocity, or at least that’s the way he thinks of it at first.   
  
It’s easy to put it into words when he's so used to thinking about it in passing, after all, when he looks at Kise’s feelings and feels a tug of gravity, the tidal forces squeezing his insides and pulling him a little bit back.   
  
“Come over, Baby. After your job if you have time.”  
  
A message, left on Kise’s voicemail, and a response hours later. Kise’s already back in Kanagawa, except Kise checks his phone all the time; Kise’s always texting and getting on social media, and maybe he doesn’t have time to check voicemails but it’s no different from when Aomine texts. And it’s a missed call from him; can’t Kise prioritize a notification from his boyfriend? Is that too much to ask?   
  
Aomine doesn’t feel like picking up, but he does anyway, listens to the lightness of the excuse and then Kise talking about his day, about modeling and Twitter, about himself. Always. Aomine wonders if he were to hang up, how long it would take Kise to notice.  
  
Aomine’s pretty bitter about this, sure, and maybe if he’d struck early, if he’d realized he’d loved Kise back sooner (or if he had sooner; it’s impossible to tell when all of this had started) he wouldn’t have to be. Maybe it would be better, but that’s not his fucking fault. But maybe thinking that a love like this that had been festering for so long inside of Kise, a transformation of their relationship when Kise’s so used to not doing this, would be a mistake anyway. But there have been bigger changes across wider gulfs; there have been longer-held loves that have worked out in the end. Just not this one.


	54. akamido, couture au

A wide variety of people visit the Shutoku alterations shop, but it gives them all time to utilize their specialties. Ootsubo with delicate embroidery, Kimura with letting clothes out, the Miyaji brothers and Takao with a little bit of everything. Midorima’s specialty is taking things in, perhaps the result of someone who’d grown up with wearing clothes several sizes too big until he’d grow into them, they’d fit for a month if he was lucky, and then they’d be too small.  
  
Most of his clients are teenagers going to their first big event, tucking in a bit of store bought formalwear they don’t quite fill out yet, the shoulders of a tuxedo or the waist of a dress, straps and sleeves and busts and waistlines. It’s just a little, working of his bandaged fingers in and out, but the end result is just enough. Less is more, after all.   
  
Akashi is the exception, of course, a wealthy man who could clearly afford his own personal tailor. Midorima had asked him why he didn’t have one, and he had said he’d heard Shutoku was the best in Tokyo and that was that. Midorima had tried not to act too pleased about the praise, and though it had perhaps not worked Akashi had bene fine with it, his smile meeting Midorima in the mirror as Midorima had pinned and tucked Akashi’s suit jacket.  
  
It’s hard not to notice Akashi’s body for something as lovely as it is, especially when Midorima’s focusing on it during most of their time together. His hands around Akashi’s waist, Akashi’s hips; at one point Midorima wonders if Akashi could be teasing him with one pair fo pants that are notably too loose in the ass (he tries not to blush, and when that fails tries not to look in the mirror or at anything other than his charts and, well, Akashi’s ass, since that’s what he’s measuring).   
  
“How did you get into this business?” Akashi says (and they’re beyond casual conversation at this point).  
  
“I’ve often had trouble finding clothes that fit me,” Midorima says, gesturing to his body, limbs too long or when they aren’t that, too slim, his body just too big overall.   
  
“Unfortunate,” says Akashi. “Do you tailor your own?”  
  
“More often than I'd like.”  
  
The next week Akashi returns with a suit in Midorima’s size, legs that do not drag on the ground but do not stop before Midorima’s ankles, tapered arms to suit his wrists, a jacket the covers his chest without straining.  
  
“I am sure you could do a better job than this,” Akashi tells him.  
  
“I can’t accept this,” says Midorima.   
  
“Then you can pay for dinner, and consider it an exchange.”


	55. aokaga, disappoint

“You wanted to talk to me, Kagami-kun.”  
  
Kagami can feel his ears heating up already. This is embarrassing, but when he’d phrased it like that there's no way he’s getting out of it, not when it’s Kuroko. It might be better to talk to Tatsuya or Alex about something like this, but they don’t know Aomine, so his circle of what to do had always gone back to talking to Kuroko, but it’s definitely kind of a little weird.   
  
“Yeah. I do.”  
  
He glances around; there don’t seem to be too many other people in the cafe but he lowers his voice anyway. “I’m not…sexually satisfied.”  
  
Kuroko blinks at him. “Why are you talking to me about this?”  
  
“Because…Aomine’s your friend, and I don’t know how to approach this, and.”  
  
“Hold up.”  
  
Shit, fuck, of course Aomine had appeared just the way Kuroko always does, right in front of them, like Kuroko had extended some cloak of invisibility over him until he’d dragged him out at the worst time. Like Kuroko had planned this, something straight out of a sitcom.  
  
“Um,” says Kagami. “Shit. Sorry.”  
  
"No, hey,” says Aomine, and he sits down in Kuroko’s chair (just vacated, of course, thanks Kuroko). “I’m sorry, but you know, you gotta tell me these things…like, just saying it like that gets me paying attention. I hope this isn’t like, a regular thing?”  
  
Kagami shrugs; he doesn’t want Aomine to feel bad, but that’s just going to leave them where they are. “Yeah. It’s basically just. I mean, I know neither of us have a lot of experience, but I’m, uh. Pretty sure sex isn’t supposed to be just like porn, you know?”  
  
“Oh,” says Aomine. “I mean, if I get off on it and you do, too…”  
  
“Well, yeah,” says Kagami. “But that’s, like, watching it is hot, but I don’t need you to say oh yeah baby all the time or whatever. Like, if you like something and you respond to it that’s—nice, but it’s like. I don’t know.”  
  
Aomine sighs, looking down at the table and rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm trying too hard. Sorry. Shit. What can I do better, though?”  
  
“Just listen,” Kagami says. “Like, if there’s something I say I like, do it more, that kind of thing.”  
  
Aomine nods. “Okay.”  
  
“And act more natural. Just say how you feel.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Kagami pauses; maybe that was too harsh. He looks down at his coffee.  
  
“For the record, I’m pretty happy with what you’re doing,” says Aomine. “But I’m not happy if I’m not pleasing you.”  
  
Shit. That was cool and extremely not, and now Kagami’s about to spill his coffee and there’s nowhere to look where he’s not blushing furiously, so he kicks Aomine’s foot under the table. Aomine kicks him back, and he knows they’ll be okay.


	56. takamido, thin walls au

The apartment next to Midorima has been vacant for a while now. Too much rent in an area heavy with students; perhaps some rich kid or a young professional who doesn’t mind the atmosphere will pick the place someday and hopefully they won’t be an obnoxious partier like the last tenant who seemingly had no job or responsibilities to worry about while Midorima was up all night trying to work or trying to sleep.   
  
The walls are thin, though, and on the first of November he hears things being shuffled around, the sound of boxes, of tools on furniture, until at around eight in the evening they stop. Midorima finishes his work as he’s accustomed to, in the quiet, and falls asleep normally.  
  
The next night he hears singing. At first, he doesn’t recognize it, thinks it might be coming up through the pipes, but it doesn’t have the trademark echo. It’s coming from next door, a clear tenor hitting all the high notes of “Moon River”. Midorima almost hums along with it, but then he realizes if he can hear his neighbor then it goes both ways. He doesn’t want to intrude, and his neighbor’s voice is lovely.   
  
Apparently, the man sings to himself all the time. Older songs, things Midorima remembers hearing nonstop as a kid, new hits Midorima vaguely recognizes from when he strolls through the supermarket or the store. Things Midorima doesn’t recognize at all, but they’re still nice to hear, a background to his work or when he’s heating up yet another frozen dinner. It makes him look at the piano and think about the time he’d said he’d set aside for it, and then, well. It’s awfully easy to find a decent edition of the sheet music to “Moon River” on the internet.  
  
Playing it would be an acknowledgement, but Midorima’s willing to make it, to give back a little, and as he strikes the keys he has to admit this is just as much for himself, a return to something he’d missed more than he’d admit. He’s a few bars in when he hears the voice, matching his accompaniment, picking up in the middle of the verse but matching Midorima’s every note.  
  
It’s five minutes after he finishes when a knock on the door comes.  
  
“You heard me, huh?”  
  
His neighbor’s cute, too; with a voice like that it’s almost unfair, bright eyes and a wide smile. Midorima nods.  
  
“You have a lovely voice.”  
  
“Well,” Midorima’s neighbor says. “If you don’t mind me singing while you play.”  
  
Midorima nods. “I don’t.”  
  
“Good.”


	57. kagahimu, weigh me down

Still, sometimes, Tatsuya wonders if he’s the one weighing Taiga down. If he is the iron shackles, hardened clay around Taiga’s feet. If he is the one whose bond is pulling Taiga back unconsciously, if he promises to do his best and honestly tries, without deceit or a desire to give Tatsuya what he thinks he wants, and still doesn’t give his all. It that inhibits him not only now, but whenever he plays basketball, whoever he’s playing against. If he’d lost an important game because he so naturally plays down to play Tatsuya that it transfers over. If, regardless of how little they want this to be, Tatsuya is the chain around Taiga’s neck, precious gold, light and of the air, pulling him back to the earth.   
  
He doesn’t bring it up; they’ve been over it. It doesn’t do to dwell on something like this; they end up talking themselves in circles and running around the same cul-de-sacs, dead end roads already retreaded. That’s probably not the case; they’re probably fine. But what if they’re not? What if it’s not like that at all?   
  
“Tatsuya, hey,” Taiga says, like he knows.  
  
And this has nothing at all to do with basketball (if anything between them, if anything about Tatsuya, can have nothing at all to do with basketball), this moment when they’re standing in the kitchen with a dirty cutting board between them and Taiga’s about to do the dishes. It’s harder and harder to continue looking him in the eye, but Tatsuya can’t not.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Tatsuya says (and maybe it’s not clear what he’s sorry for, whether it’s for being a burden or maybe being a burden or for thinking this way in the first place, not clear to Taiga or even to himself).   
  
“Don’t be,” Taiga says. “Just…I don't want you to think like that. Because you’re not weighing me down, and even if you were I’d rather play with you than with anyone else.”  
  
“Taiga,” Tatsuya says, the notion of how unfair this is just as explicit as if Tatsuya had gone ahead and said it. “I.”  
  
“You’re wonderful. You push me to do better, and you always have, and if you need me to tell you again that’s not a big deal, okay?”  
  
Tatsuya nods.   
  
Taiga nods back. The cutting board’s still dirty, and they still need to do the dishes, but those thoughts stop persisting when Taiga leans across the table to touch his forehead against Tatsuya’s.


	58. aokaga, actor au

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Kagami’s this fucking oblivious? Aomine’s not so sure, or maybe it’s both. Because it’s good that Kagami can’t see how pathetic he is and laugh at him, but it’s bad that Kagami can’t see and decide that maybe he likes Aomine back. So Aomine’s kind of a terrible flirt, and several months of hanging out with all of their actor friends together have not once resulted in Kagami accepting Aomine’s advances. He’s never outright rejected Aomine, either, though, and it’s not even like it’s mixed messages. There’s no fucking message at all.   
  
And of course they’d get cast in these roles in a play, like the worst kind of dramatic irony with the play within the play on they’re living real life, which is not fiction and does not contain the same kind of happily coincidental ending where Kagami, who has to act like he’s been secretly in love with Aomine, either actually falls in love with him after pretending for several nights a week over the course of a few months, or was in love with him from the beginning.  
  
Halfway through the run of the play, it has become abundantly clear that neither is the case, that it is just Daiki who is the star of this tragedy where he pines after the guy pretending to pine for him, and it’s even worse when he can’t forget they’re in a play but his body can’t read the signals Kagami’s character is giving his and interpret that as Kagami giving them to the actual him. He doesn’t even have to imagine, not when they kiss on stage, what Kagami tastes like, what his hands feel like on Aomine’s waist. Aomine’s character is a damn fool for not realizing someone that brilliant is in love with him.   
  
And so maybe it’s a bad idea, but as the last week approaches they’re no closer. The director keeps talking about fire, punctuating the ending, and all Aomine can think of is their big damn kiss getting steamier as they go, how he’ll push it and Kagami will push it, how they’d added tongues and teeth and touching each other’s asses, eye contact afterward to say that hey, good acting but it was just acting.  
  
Aomine kisses Kagami backstage, when the audience is just a murmur on the other side of the curtain.   
  
“We don’t need practice,” Kagami says.  
  
“That wasn’t practice,” says Aomine. “I like you, idiot.”  
  
“Oh,” says Kagami.  
  
(It’s Kagami who kisses Aomine after the play, a hastily-muttered did you think those looks were just acting I’m not that good separating the first and second, and after that they lose count pretty quickly.)


	59. the one with the anthropomorphized high schools

“It’s a shame Fukuda Sogo couldn’t come today,” says Rakuzan, pouring out their tea into a cup, spilling not a drop on the saucer. “Tea?”  
  
“Don’t be catty,” says Kaijou.   
  
“I’ll have some tea, thanks,” says Shutoku, pushing up their threadbare sleeves.   
  
“They couldn’t come because you didn’t invite them,” says Yosen, either missing the point completely or not at all and highlighting it, Touou’s not sure (not that it really matters).   
  
“Do you want them here?” says Touou.  
  
“Not really,” says Yosen.  
  
A cough from Seirin that says, definitely not. Nothing from Kaijou and nothing at all from Teikou staring up at Rakuzan like they’re trying to worship but too blinded and dazzled by Rakuzan’s light. Touou snorts. Please, talk about dim.   
  
“What was that?” says Rakuzan.  
  
Touou shrugs; they’re not stupid and they’re not trying to start shit with Rakuzan at Rakuzan’s party. That’s a little bit too much even from them, and they’ve started an awful lot of shit (and heaped on other people’s piles, too, but it’s not like any of these other teams are saints, as much as Seirin would like to think they are). Besides, it’s more fun to just kick back and watch the other teams wind each other up.   
  
“Anyway,” says Yosen, and doesn’t continue.  
  
“Anyway,” Shutoku repeats, folding their hands on the table, elegant and strong as befitting a king, someone who plays into their role and abides by it, finds comfort in established limits (maybe that’s being too mean, but hey, Touou’s been putting in a better showing than Shutoku lately—for the most part).   
  
Teikou pours some tea into their own cup, then refilling Rakuzan’s. Symbiotic, almost, Touou thinks, leaning back in their chair and rubbing their nose. It would be more interesting if they were all to talk basketball strategy, the positions of their players, of coaches and managers, the way all of them jockey for position with each other, crowd each other out. It’s funny how a middle school like Teikou, even they it had funneled their last graduating class into all of them (ha ha, insert sex joke here) gets this kind of invitation. One emperor to another, Touou supposes, holding out their teacup until Shutoku fills it for them (at least someone around here is reliable).  
  
“I’m looking forward to the next Interhigh,” says Seirin.   
  
Rakuzan raises an eyebrow; Kaijou opens their mouth, overeager, and then shuts it again before the rebuttal can come out.


	60. aomurakagahimu, naming their pet cat

The cat meows, loudly baring his teeth at the four of them, trying to scare or impress or just join them in the noise Taiga’s not totally sure. He bats at Taiga’s hand, claws retracted; Taiga scratches the top of his head (he’s kind of enjoying being the favorite right about now, especially when the cat leans into his touch).   
  
“I still think we should name him LeBron. He looks strong,” says Daiki.   
  
They’re all at the point of ignoring this suggestion, which they’ve all shot down multiple times (though whatever they choose, Taiga wouldn’t bet against Daiki referring to the cat as LeBron anyway). Atsushi relaxes, sitting back on his hands and looking at the cat as if to sway his attention, and Tatsuya leans against Taiga’s shoulder. The cat looks up at both of them.  
  
“How about Mikan?” says Taiga.  
  
“Because he's orange? That’s dumb,” says Atsushi.  
  
“I think it’s cute,” says Tatsuya.   
  
“Might as well name him Basketball,” says Daiki.  
  
Taiga snorts. The cat’s finally tired of him, ambling over towards Tatsuya for some other attention. Tatsuya’s smile is soft; he scratches right behind the cat’s ears and the cat closes his eyes, tilting his head back.   
  
“What do you think, Tatsuya?” says Taiga.   
  
Tatsuya hums; the cat decides he’s had enough and walks away from all of them, flicking his ears and heading down the hall.   
  
“Chip?” says Tatsuya.   
  
Poker chip? Potato chip? Chipped glass? Neither one of those makes much sense in this context, but names don’t really have to make sense and the more Taiga thinks about it the more it seems to work.   
  
“It’s okay,” Atsushi allows.  
  
Daiki shrugs, and if Taiga were a betting man he’d take an over/under on how soon Daiki stops even bothering to use that name.  
  
*  
  
Daiki’s finally back from a trip; it’s been too long since they’ve all been together and even if they’re not all going to come out and say it, Taiga can see it in the way Atsushi looks at him when he leaves the room, the way it takes Tatsuya too long to let go of his hand, fingers trailing off until they hit the air. The way they hold the space for him when he gets up from the couch, and when Taiga decides he needs to check the refrigerator before they go grocery shopping.   
  
“C’mere, Chip,” Daiki says, crouched on the floor looking at the cat.   
  
Chip comes to him, brushing the top of his head against Daiki’s knee, and Taiga can’t help but smile from the doorway.


	61. akamayu, violation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> graphic imagery

Akashi is a human violation. His existence, everything he does, is invasive, like kudzu or giant carp or the wrong strain of bamboo, choking out everything and taking over, rooting itself too deeply to be pulled out, even if it’s like a barbed thorn ripping away Mayuzumi’s skin. That would be a small price to pay, Mayuzumi thinks, but he can’t even do that. It’s like ripping it out would rip out all of his veins and kill him, and he still wouldn’t get the whole damn thing.   
  
At first it hadn’t seemed so bad; it had been kind of amusing that Akashi had come in all conceited and entitled and everyone else in Mayuzumi’s year had resigned—Higuchi had tried to make it onto the team all over again, of course, and Mayuzumi had stayed. Better to move up in the depth chart, stay longer, hang around (and it’s not like he’d liked any of his classmates all that much). Better to take Akashi up on the offer that isn’t as enticing as he thinks it is, but is more than good enough (even if Akashi’s intruding on his personal space and doesn’t give a shit, at least he’s not giving a fake apology and at least he sees Mayuzumi and treats him as an equal to not himself, but his teammates—a stupid thing to aspire to, but here they are).   
  
Better until it’s not, until Akashi starts stealing pieces of him, until Akashi smiles out of the corner of his eye and Mayuzumi feels like the love interest in a light novel. Isn’t he supposed to be the fucking protagonist? Akashi should be the rival, or the love interest, or whatever; he’s too perfect for that (not perfect in that way, but in the way that everything about him is—oh, fuck it). It doesn’t matter now, because Akashi’s under his skin, ripping him apart and planting his own seeds like they’re about to burst forth. Like Mayuzumi doesn’t belong to himself, like he’s not as detached as he’s spent the last two and a half years becoming. Like that’s all suddenly irrelevant, that his careful efforts are for nothing. He wants to grab Akashi by the shoulders and shake him; he wants to punch Akashi in the face; he wants to kiss Akashi until his lips are swollen and he looks breathless, catch him off guard even though Akashi’s probably fucking expecting it by now.


	62. akamayu, mennyms au

Seijuurou is a doll, and he always was; it won’t do for Chihiro to forget that. And he’s never forgotten it really, his flesh hand touching the soft cloth of Seijuurou’s body. A soft tone, close to that of what a real skin of flesh might take on, variegated by age and sunlight. A body that will not regenerate, that will sprout mold when it is not properly dried from the rain. Chihiro does not forget this. How can he? He doesn’t forget, but Seijuurou hides things, does not feel them himself, one button eye torn off and lost to the world, to the two of them, the brighter one, already a replacement.   
  
Chihiro has the original. He’s not sure it’s an improvement, or if the last one was, but with only one eye left Seijuurou’s shut down. He’s not dead, or in a coma, or any other vulgar metaphor too tied in to humanity, to this kind of life. Seijuurou is alive when he is; this is consciousness and no facsimile of such things. Of that, Chihiro’s sure, even if he has no proof of anything or wouldn’t no how to prove it if he were to find any evidence, other than the way Seijuurou looks at him.  
  
This causes Seijuurou no pain, the needle stuck into the cloth of his skin, or at least Chihiro’s fairly certain it doesn’t. Seijuurou’s caused him plenty of inconvenience, but Chihiro still doesn’t stab. That’s only going to create bad stitches, the kind that had gotten them into this mess (Chihiro wonders about the person who had taken Seijuurou apart, put him back together again like a clock with its ticking mechanism slightly off from where it had been; he’s not jealous of that person, just curious, and that’s all, thanks very much). He goes back and forth, over under, stitches. Knots, but nothing tight enough to wrinkle and tie Seijuurou’s skin the wrong way. It looks right, the matching red eye, in a sense that symmetrical is right. It looks wrong, too; that’s not the way Seijuurou is. Chihiro will get used to it, if it means Seijuurou’s back (not that he’ll say something so pathetic out loud).  
  
There is still more, a few bits of Seijuurou’s hair to trim away. That won’t grow back but yarn’s cheap if he doesn’t like it, at least cheap enough for Seijuurou to afford. Chihiro’s not buying it for him.


	63. aokaga, gossip girl au

It’s four in the morning and they’re drunk somewhere in Jersey. Somewhere, with a more specific name if they could remember what train station they’d gotten off at or if they could stab the faces of their dying phones in the right way to turn on location and get it.   
  
“We should call a cab,” says Kagami.  
  
“You have no sense of adventure,” says Aomine, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his Brooks Brothers khakis, as if searching for the keys whose ring he’d slipped around his finger, like a wedding room.  
  
“Are you married to your apartment?” Kagami says out loud, and holy shit that’s the most dumb plastered rich kid thing he’s said in a while (despite being a rich kid all of the time, and plastered and kind of dumb some of the time if he’s being honest with himself).  
  
“It’s my parents’, anyway,” says Aomine, even though they both know Aomine’s parents are never there (though at least, Kagami thinks, with the spare bitterness he allows himself only in moments like this, they had at one point).   
  
Kagami nods, leaning his head on Aomine’s shoulder. God, he's tired; it's late, so late it’s crossing back around into early, and even though they don’t have school tomorrow and they’re past the point where extracurriculars fucking matter, he still feels like he’s got somewhere to be. His apartment, which would make a terrible spouse, but his awfully comfortable bed. Awfully comfortable compared to standing on a damp sidewalk in loafers.   
  
“You have those cab app things,” says Aomine. “Use one.”  
  
“You do, too; it’s not like you’d buy a phone with no storage.”  
  
“I dunno what mine has," says Aomine.   
  
Kagami rolls his eyes, pulling out his phone again. Fifteen percent. They charge close to a thousand bucks for this shit and it won’t keep itself on all night when it’s doing mostly nothing, what a fucking ripoff. It’s only four tries until he unlocks the screen; he looks up and it seems a little darker. Like some of the streetlights have gone off, or maybe the moon was up earlier. He looks back down; the phone’s gone black again. Fuck.   
  
He finally manages to get a Lyft, twenty minutes away but it’ll take them back home. Unless Aomine’s house, but nah, they’ve already put it in. And it’s not like Aomine hasn’t spent many nights in Kagami’s bed, mostly keeping him awake (most of that time with obnoxious shit like questions that make Kagami seriously wonder if all that weed’s permanently addled his brain).  
  
“C’mere,” says Aomine, pulling Kagami in to kiss his forehead, and Kagami’s not going to question the gratuitous affection.


	64. midokise, control

They’ve never said it out loud, written it down, made it any kind of explicit, but there are things they talk about and things they don’t. Rarely, something will migrate from the second category to the first, but the second is much smaller, and it’s really a category made to encompass those last few months at Teikou. The things they remember, clear in their memories, burned into their minds like staring straight at a solar eclipse, but the thoughts that they do not voice.  
  
It’s less painful to think them now that everything’s happened, after they’ve all played again together, but it doesn't erase them. It overwrites them, leaves the blemish in the middle of the picture and paints around it, leaving it blended into the background for anyone coming across the image now. But they know where to look for it, what to find.   
  
It hadn’t been all bad, if Midorima’s in an optimistic mood. Either way, he and Kise had grown closer for being in that particular moment at that time, even if that hadn’t meant what it does now. It had started them on the path that finds them here, fingers entwined, Kise kissing Midorima until he runs out of exuberance and then slows down, keeping his lips on Midorima’s. And Midorima hopes that both of them are happy (he knows he is, indescribably so, the way seeing Kise makes him feel awfully warm and strange inside). But even though it had led here, had it bene worth it? To have those ghosts haunting both of them, hanging off their windowsills, whispering and nudging?   
  
But they’re good at ignoring the ghosts, just as they’re good at not bringing up the past, letting it lie between them even though it rolls at the surface like a boil. It might be useless to just wait for it to evaporate; that could take longer than they’re both alive. But they’re still not ready to talk about it, even if they're ready to think about it, even if Kise closes his eyes and probably thinks about it sometime and Midorima pushes up his glasses because he doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. Kise’s better at changing the subject, anyway.  
  
“Do you ever think about Teikou?” Kise says, though.  
  
“Yeah,” says Midorima. “Sometimes.”  
  
(They don’t say much more than that, at least for the moment, but it’s a start.)


	65. momoriko, holding

Satsuki's analysis does not fail her often. It’s empirical data, her own intuition, years of experience, and the utter simplicity of a studied boy crumbles under the weight of it. It does not fall apart when she applies it to someone else, but if that someone else is Riko, then it still doesn’t crumble. But it’s unreliable; it accounts for enough of her failures that luck is not the culprit and even without performing a statistical test Satsuki’s intuition tells her enough. It’s in the way Riko distracts her, keeping her from focusing, from figuring things out in time, as if everything was suddenly moving toward a black hole and she can’t turn her head away, can’t look from Riko’s sharp eyes, her small hands with slim fingers and blunt nails.   
  
Satsuki’s not often wrong, but she is when it comes to Riko. Like that of course Riko liked her back; of course it’s a possibility and of course it’s a reality but she’d had everything laid out, a course of likely actions, but Riko had shorted the fuse and asked her out when they’d been maybe two thirds of the way through, because she’d wanted to and because she’d thought Satsuki was taking things too slowly (and it had been too slowly for what Satsuki had wanted, but she’d assumed, based on evidence, Riko’s personality, intuition, that Riko had wanted things slower, and wrongly so).  
  
Riko stands on her own, but not in a lonely way. Self-sufficient, a pillar holding itself up, no roof above it, limitless and without a ceiling, but nothing to hold it up. No buttress, no extra support, just itself, anchored to the ground. From Satsuki’s vantage, it’s beautiful, even when she wants to pick Riko up and cuddle her close and hold her, take advantage of their height difference and rub it in Riko’s face in a way that has nothing to do with words and everything to do with how damn cute Riko can be.   
  
“Why don’t you ever hold me?” Riko says.  
  
“You can hold your own,” says Satsuki.  
  
“I know that; I know you know that,” says Riko. “Just because I can doesn’t mean I want to all the time, and I’d let you. Maybe.”  
  
“Maybe, huh?” says Satsuki.  
  
“Yeah,” says Riko turning away to hide the flush on her cheeks.  
  
Satsuki’s not going to take Riko by surprise here when she gathers her into her arms, but sometimes there’s nothing wrong with fulfilling expectations, especially when it feels so good.


	66. imahana, buried blood

“I read this article the other day,” says Shouichi.  
  
Makoto pretends to ignore him, even though they’re next to each other on the couch. If he were a cat, though, Shouichi reckons his ears would be perked up and were he napping, curled into a ball, his eyes would be halfway open at least. And he’d be pretending to flick his tail at a bug, alert because of the imaginary fly buzzing past his nose. Makoto would make an awfully cute cat, sulking the way he does, but for now he’s a human and there are certainly some advantages to that.   
  
“It was talking about old demonic rituals. Vials of mixed blood, how that stuff’s getting popular with the kids nowadays.”  
  
“Kids are weird,” says Makoto.  
  
“I think they meant people our age,” says Shouichi.  
  
“Whatever. People are dumb; they hop on the latest trend and they don’t care if it’s weird.”  
  
“You mean you wouldn’t mix your blood with mine and bury it in the yard to make sure I’d never leave you? I guess you must not really love me.”  
  
“That sounds like something you would do, you creep,” says Makoto. “You haven’t done it, right?”  
  
Shouichi doesn’t answer; this time it’s his turn to fake being interested in his newspaper. Let Makoto think what he wants to about drawing blood, about these rituals he’s probably never heard of, chants praising some sort of demon or false idol that only work to make edgy teenagers feel more powerful. None of this is real, of course, except for the physical buried blood, the imprint on someone’s psyche after it’s been done to them. And now, Makoto’s aggravation and the worry he’s trying not to show.  
  
“Do you want to leave?” Shouichi says.  
  
“I don’t want my choice taken away from me,” says Makoto. “But I bet you didn’t actually do it.”  
  
Shouichi shrugs; Makoto can swing back and forth, more wildly and quickly the longer Shouichi goes without offering him a true answer. It’s amusing even if it’s ultimately unproductive, as it ends up with the newspaper on the floor and Shouichi attempting to calm down Makoto, and Makoto giving him aggravated snarls and insults and kisses. Which, taken as a whole, isn’t nothing, isn’t completely bad. But in terms of end results, even if Shouichi’s the one who had brought it up, he’d rather it go somewhere else, somewhere that ends with the two of them back on the couch as normal. He gets his wish, though, when MAkoto huffs and crosses his arms, sinking back, refusing to take the bait. Maybe he’s learning, though it had taken him long enough.


	67. nijihimu, usc au

Tatsuya grabs Shuu’s shorts on purpose, but his hoodie by accident. They’ve done both before, sometimes deliberate, like when Shuu wears Tatsuya’s hoodie around their apartment, sprawls out on his stomach on the couch because he knows Tatsuya likes it and wants to get his possessive streak revved up, or when Tatsuya wears Shuu’s because it’s just a little bigger and because Shuu will fake getting annoyed when he can’t find his hoodie and he traces over the letters in his name on the back when he holds Tatsuya and doesn’t say anything but he’s every bit as possessive sometimes.   
  
It’s nice, though, walking through campus with the hoodie everyone knows is Shuu’s on, Shuu’s shorts in his gym bag along with his own jersey (because there are limits to what they can call a mistake, and that’s the kind of shit Coach would stop pretending not to notice and chew them out for, and when Shuu’s the captain it’s not worth it—maybe after the season, when they do some charity match and can pretend to laugh about it, but then that’s a little painful to think about). He thinks about wearing the number four, stitching against his back in that pattern, too soft to really feel or notice, but different from the twelve he wears now, even different from the four he’d worn his last year at Yosen. Shuu’s number four, and that’s where it matters.  
  
He gets waylaid by a talkative classmate, but still gets to the gym early. Shuu’s already there, though, still in Tatsuya’s hoodie over his practice clothes and carrying Starbucks for both of them. His arm drops to squeeze Tatsuya’ waist and Tatsuya pulls his iced coffee from the cardboard tray.   
  
“Hey, Captain, how come you didn’t buy me coffee?” says one of the freshmen, and Shuu roolls his eyes.  
  
“You didn't buy me coffee last time. I don’t know what you want; Tatsuya’s boring.”  
  
“Hey,” says Tatsuya. “There’s nothing wrong with a standby drink. It’s not like you get something different every time.”  
  
“Yeah, well,” says Shuu. “It’s not a plain iced coffee.”  
  
“There’s taste in simplicity.”  
  
“I wonder,” says Shuu, and he looks for a second like he’s about to kiss Tatsuya, right here in the locker room, with cappuccino foam dried on his lips, and Tatsuya kind of wants him to—but he doesn’t, taking another sip instead, and wearing his hoodie and drinking the coffee he’d bout is something Tatsuya’s going to have to settle for.


	68. aosaku/kagasaku, motorbike

The choice is one, the other, neither. Aomine hasn’t made his intentions explicit but he’s made them clear, and Sakurai can’t hide behind the denial of that. Kagami hasn’t made his intentions clear through actions but he’d stated them, said he’d give Sakurai time to think it over. It should make everything more confusing, leave Sakurai in the midst of indecision, but it’s pushed him toward a choice. After all, if he has to say something to Kagami, he’ll have to consider his feelings with Aomine.   
  
Which he has been, but not carefully, a stone turned roughly over in the palms of his mind. He could reciprocate, make his own intentions clear. He could choose to be with Aomine, the taxation on his body of playing together, their bond worn in but not worn out. What if it does wear out, though; what if it does grow thin and warped and frayed? Beyond a turn in a road where they either can’t see or are both too arrogant to admit is there, the hairpin turn that will sever them as they make it.   
  
But wanting Kagami is somewhat separate, or it would be if Sakurai did, because his initial reaction had been a no, rising to his lips though he’d cut it off, forced an apology over it, that had turned into an apology for not giving him an answer right away. He could have; the no that rises to his mind now is no more tentative. He barely knows Kagami; Kagami only sees him a certain way, perhaps as someone who needs something or someone. Kagami is the type of person who likes to be needed; Sakurai can see it because he’s that way himself.   
  
Aomine can see it but he’s not that way; he leans on Sakurai and asks for things from him, reminds him that he needs a lunch or a sharp pass or someone to kick his ass and make him do the bare minimum to pass class. And perhaps a direct comparison is unfair to both of them, but the situation is inherently unfair to everyone involved, even if Aomine and Kagami don’t know the whole thing. And some choices are worth waiting for; some choices force indecision, brief or longer than that. This isn’t one of them, and Sakurai can’t say he’s spoken for at this moment—but he can say he’s not really interested; he can apologize even though he’ll hear Aomine’s voice echoing that feelings aren’t something you should apologize for. Maybe they aren’t, but this is Sakurai’s own apology. Even with this, there are some things that have nothing to do with Aomine.


	69. midokaga, cold

Midorima’s cold. He’s not heartless; Kagami’s seen that for himself. There are things he cares about, basketball and his friends and even his horoscope bullshit, but still. What about dating? Kagami’s got nothing to stand on here; he’s never dated anyone, never expressed any open interest in anyone that way. He’s had interests, sure, an interest in Midorima right now, as ill-advised and coming from nowhere as it is. They go to schools at opposite ends of the city from each other; they’re going to face off at basketball again and again (but then, that’s what had attracted Kagami to Midorima in the first place, the drive to win, the wingspan, those arms that shoot long threes and rise to block his shots).   
  
If Midorima were interested, how would Kagami even know what to look for? He thinks of how Takao says Midorima’s a tsundere, but there’s no cutesy blushing and stuttering that comes when they talk. Midorima doesn’t like to give compliments straight up, doesn’t like to say something’s important to him, but there’s a certain vulnerability in that, and if everything Kuroko says about Teikou was true, it’s a little too obvious to draw the connection. But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s not there, and just because it’s there doesn’t mean Kagami should just accept it and pretend it’s not.   
  
It doesn’t mean there’s a hole in Midorima’s chest waiting to be filled with another heart. It doesn’t mean Midorima does or doesn’t have a certain capacity within him; it doesn’t mean Kagami has a chance or that he doesn’t. It just means he’s run back around to the dead end of not knowing what to look for as a clear sign of interest or lack thereof.   
  
The best way is to ask, to move things into place and stare Midorima straight in those lovely eyes and ask him if he will. If he wants to. Kagami’s no coward; he knows how to say things like he means them, when he does. There’s nothing that keeping this crush does for him, here, as they are. This isn’t something he can solve by dunking a basketball or taking something in his hands, and he’s not great with words.   
  
But for Midorima, he’s got to be good enough. Because if there’s one thing he knows about Midorima, it’s that he won’t accept less than someone’s best. He doesn’t deserve less than that, either.


	70. kagahimu, hockey au

“I can afford the full price,” says Taiga.  
  
“I know you can,” says Tatsuya.  
  
This is the same argument that they’ve had every time Taiga’s come in, which is maybe more often than strictly necessary because his school has their own equipment for that and trainers and way more than any high schooler needs, and he can get his skates sharpened as often as he wants there. They don’t do it as well as Tatsuya, though. And if Taiga does it there, he doesn’t get to hang around here with Tatsuya, watch him work with customers, help small kids with clueless parents try to find skates in their size.   
  
But watching Tatsuya at home with sharpening, bent over the machine holding Taiga’s skates is worth double the price. He doesn’t get to do it much as part of a summer job at a sports store, but it makes Taiga feel a little bit more special. He thinks about the first few times they’d stepped on the ice, different enough from inline skates that it had felt wrong. The times Tatsuya had spent watching skates get sharpened while Taiga did his homework or dozed off on Tatsuya’s shoulder, too tired from skating all day to think about that. But Tatsuya lives and breathes hockey, rinks, skates on his feet.   
  
“All done,” says Tatsuya, fitting the guards back on.   
  
“Thanks,” says Taiga, purposefully brushing his fingertips across Tatsuya’s knuckles as he takes his skates back.  
  
Tatsuya smiles; he knows what Taiga’s doing; he lets his hands stay on the laces for just a little bit longer.   
  
“When do you get off?”  
  
“In time to see your practice game this evening.”  
  
“Before then?”  
  
“You have practice.”  
  
“I have a lunch break," says Taiga. “I want to make it count.”  
  
“You’d choose me over food?” says Tatsuya.  
  
As if that’s even a question. Taiga holds his gaze steady on Tatsuya’s, and Tatusya looks away first, dropping his hand to the counter.  
  
“Taiga.”  
  
“Tatsuya.”  
  
“I’m still giving you the employee discount.”  
  
He bumps Taiga’s shoulder on the way to the register. Taiga bumps him back, and he thinks about hip-checking Tatsuya into one of the displays only they’d knock it over and Tatsuya works here and they’d probably have to put it back together and, well. He’d be late to practice, but he’d rather Tatsuya were there, slick stick handling and bright laugh, perfect saucer pass across the ice.


	71. kagasaku, biting

Ryou bites. Ryou bites fucking hard sometimes, teeth sinking into Taiga’s chest and neck so he gasps, his head fuzzy with want all of a sudden cleared up like he’d been dipped into an ice bath, submerged and held underwater, like all the oxygen in his veins has been replaced with caffeine. The marks leave bruises, possession, tooth marks, a reminder that Taiga’s Ryou’s and no one else is allowed to have him, which is a sentiment Taiga shares to a degree, and Ryou knows that just because Taiga doesn’t bite back doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it.  
  
Ryou bites the inside of Taiga’s mouth and Taiga pulls back; he can taste the salt and rusty tang of blood almost right away, running his tongue along the ridges on the inside of his lip.  
  
“Sorry!” Ryou says, pulling away. “I didn’t mean—not that hard—I mean.”  
  
Taiga’s still passing the tip of his tongue over it; it doesn’t feel that bad. The ends of his teeth, scraping the tears, actually kind of good. He shakes his head, squeezing Ryou’s hand. It’s going to swell; it’ll be difficult for him toe at without wincing, like a burn or a canker sore, a marking invisible but not one Taiga’s going to forget about until he’s in the locker room and someone points it out or he’s looking in the mirror after a shower and the faded bruise on the top of his chest pops out at him.   
  
“It’s okay,” says Taiga. “I’m okay with it.”  
  
“Sorry,” Ryou says again, leaning up to kiss him.   
  
His eyes are wide, like a startled deer Taiga’s heard, but that’s a poor analogy, even at first glance. They’re too sharp for that, too of the moment, of knowing exactly what he’s doing even when he bites too hard or too soft. Exacting, the way a deer is not—exacting, but pretty damn cute. Taiga kisses Ryou again, mouth open, tongues meeting, Ryou tasting the blood on his mouth. A small gasp and a stutter of breath, but he’s okay with it, too, his mouth curling inot a shy smile, understated but saying just enough about how much he likes this, too.   
  
Ryou bites a line down Taiga’s neck, nothing deep or hard enough to leave a mark for every long, but sucking on his toothmarks and leaving dents he runs over with his fingertips so that Taiga feels the tiny pits he’s dug.


	72. akakuro, weak-minded love

A love you can forget about easily is a weak-minded love. Kuroko had read that in a novel at some point, though he’s not entirely sure if it’s true. Is it weak-minded to love and let go, or is that a strong and rational mind? Then again, a weak-minded love hurts less, invests less of yourself. It’s easy to extract yourself when your willpower isn't in it, after all. A love with a strong mind has weight, power, raw hurt that drags across you like a rake, like sandpaper, like rough surf.   
  
It hadn’t hurt at first, that Akashi had been so strong and Kuroko so weak. That had been how things were, a way Akashi and Kuroko could both accept, their minds meeting in a certain (perhaps mis-) conception. A united front, a united Teikou, something that everyone who stayed had accepted in their own way. And maybe that’s why, because it had been so easy to play their roles, the captain and the shadow, the small and strong and the small and weaker, it had been so easy to fall into this, glances and touches and escalating words until Akashi had kissed him in the back of the staircase, firm and determined. Akashi’s mind is not weak, and yet there are things it does not have to strive for. This had been one of them, until it hadn’t been.  
  
Kuroko doesn’t always think that Akashi had done this out of some desire to make it hurt, to give the story more weight, to wreck everything at Teikou and shatter it as a test of love. He wouldn’t put it past Akashi, but he wouldn’t put it past himself were he in Akashi’s position. It’s hard to find a true test until it blindsides you; when you control the circumstances there’s a chance for a better outcome. To weld them together or rend them apart, torn into pieces. To make it hurt, to cut open the skin and sink the knife in deep, deeper. To make it bad, and then to make it worse.  
  
It doesn’t matter if Akashi had done it on purpose, anyway; that’s the outcome. Sick, poisoned, the barbs below both of their surfaces, double bladed harpoons. The weight of each other is dragging them down, and even if it had started out weak or convenient, that’s not where it’s going to end up. You can’t take this much back, no matter how much you want to.


	73. kikasa, archery

Kasamatsu is not easy to please. He is not free with his praise, although he is fair with it; he rewards effort but also the result. Another sweep of bulls-eyes from Kise, another nod from Kasamatsu. Expectation as the ace, a bar he has set and must continue to clear. This is like Teikou, where the best was expected—but not like Teikou, where he was the weakest link. Here he is the strongest, and Kasamatsu has told him there’s a weight. A weight of being the ace, but half that weight is attention, and Kise’s used to that.  
  
Nakamura practices next to him, steady hand, wiping sweat from his glasses. Slow, hitting marks like darts, each place on the ring. The arrows fly in a smooth arc and pierce the target, retread the same holes, widen others. His ninth misses the target entirely, and that’s why he’s not a starter, Kise supposes. Hayakawa is yelling in support; Kasamatsu is yelling at Moriyama to pay attention. Kobori nods to Kise, and Kise nods back.  
  
Kasamatsu’s the one who stays longest after practice, going over scouting reports, studying them the way Kise’s seen people cram for tests the night before, only their next match is a week and a half away. He shoots, too, arrows flying at a steady pace, one after the other, his stance so practiced it’s become natural. Kise’s copied him, but it feels wrong with his larger body, with the way he’s used to shooting. He doesn’t keep much of it, but there’s something behind that he hasn’t quite captured yet.   
  
“Why are you still here? Get a good night’s sleep; catch up on your homework.”  
  
“I wanted to wait for you, Senpai.”  
  
“You’re a couple of years away from having to worry about this,” says Kasamatsu. “But thanks.”  
  
“Naming me captain already? Senpai—”  
  
Kasamatsu whacks him on the shoulder with the clipboard; Kise pouts. That shoulder’s important, and he’s about to say that Kasamatsu’s so mean before Kasamatsu preemptively interrupts him.  
  
“It’s the responsibility of all the third years. Kobori and Moriyama do this, too; I just do it more.”  
  
Kise watches as Kasamatsu scratches tinier and tinier notes in the margins.   
  
“If you don’t bother me, I guess you can stay.”  
  
And Kise’s got a reputation for being loud, but he knows how to keep quiet, too. If it’s going to let him stay here now without a fight, then he will.


	74. aomomo, marriage

“Don’t act like you’re not bored, Kuro-chin.”  
  
Kuroko looks up; Murasakibara sits down next to him, even more heavily than he has to, and leans on the table. In his hands is a cheap domestic beer, not what Kuroko would think he’d go for, but then again price is a factor here. Momoi had asked Kuroko his opinion on the lack of open bar and truthfully he doesn’t have one; he's not much of a drinker and if it keeps people from getting wasted then maybe that’s a good thing. On the other hand, well, some people look like they want to be drinking more.   
  
“Momoi-san is happy,” says Kuroko.   
  
This is true; the wedding is about the people getting married and Kuroko is here to support Momoi and Aomine. He’s not fond of parties in the first place, and he doubts Murasakibara is, either. Momoi is having a fantastic time on the dance floor; she’s already made Kuroko dance with her twice, and then Sakurai and Susa, making Aomine wait again. Aomine’s politely danced with his cousins but is currently trying to dance Momoi over to the edge of the dance floor, move his hands down to her ass. Of course he’d want to focus more on the wedding night aspect, lead her back to the hotel and their deluxe suite, but Momoi is far from finished with this.   
  
“Mine-chin isn’t,” says Murasakibara, taking a sip of his beer.   
  
There really aren’t that many people to talk to, mostly Momoi’s and Aomine’s relatives, who include several screaming children and their parents (who are trying to see how much they can get away with drinking). It’s a beautiful wedding, but the food’s been mediocre at best, the cake overly sweet and kind of stale. Kuroko knows most of the people at this table, reserved for middle school friends; it’s himself and Murasakibara and Kise and a few others from basketball, a few people from Momoi's class. Most of them have left already, and Kuroko thinks that perhaps he ought to. It’s been a long night, and perhaps it will give Aomine and Momoi extra incentive to go upstairs and make Aomine cheer up a little bit. Looking annoyed at one’s own wedding is a bit unbecoming.  
  
“This isn’t very good. You want it, Kuro-chin?”  
  
Kuroko accepts the mostly-full bottle of beer. It gives him something to do with his hands at least, an excuse to not be out on the dance floor.


	75. kagahimu, bubbles

Tatsuya’s parents’ cat is getting older now, but she still likes to play with bubbles on the porch, her eyes shining as she sits up, batting at them with her paw and flinching back when they pop, as if surprised that this would happen even though it never hasn’t. They used to sit on the porch and blow bubbles when it was raining out or the street courts were closed, for repavement and repainting or something else, leaning against the side of the house until the cat got bored.   
  
She’s at about that point right now, lazily smacking a bubble in midair and then yawning; Tatsuya places the bubble wand back in the container and leans against Taiga’s shoulder. There’s soap on his hands; he rubs them on his jeans and Taiga wrinkles his nose.   
  
“Gross.”  
  
“You’re gross,” says Tatsuya, and it’s not much of a comeback but it gets Taiga to laugh, and Tatsuya closes his eyes and feels the way it makes Taiga’s chest move.   
  
His fingers are still slippery when he slips his hand into Taiga’s palm; the cat meows at them and then wanders away, back into the house through the open screen door. Taiga yawns.  
  
“Tired?” says Tatsuya.  
  
“Mm. I’m glad I’m out here with you.”  
  
No matter how often Taiga says things like that, it always makes Tatsuya feel like scrunching his body up a little bit more, pressing it closer to Taiga’s, like all at once he can’t contain his emotions and he needs to wrap himself closer.   
  
“I’m glad, too,” he says, kissing Taiga’s shirt right over his shoulder.   
  
It’s like he’s said it without saying it, how Taiga hauls him into his lap, how entirely different this is from the way things were when they were eleven and twelve and Tatsuya was still (barely) taller, when these emotions lay restless between them, fidgeting like the sweat beading on the backs of their necks. A cricket chirps, starting a chain reaction in a chorus, then a buzz of cicadas, rising and falling like a wave (like a wave in a baseball stadium, when the cheer grows closer to you, more than the ocean wave it attempts to imitate).  
  
The cat returns, apparently bored of the inside, rubbing her head and neck against Tatsuya’s bare ankle. Taiga hugs him closer, like this is a territory war that he wants to win, and Tatsuya laughs. Looking at Taiga’s smile in return from this angle fills him with the same feelings all over again in a flood, only this time there’s no urge to make any kind of move; it’s just comfortable.


	76. teikou, fix fic

It’s still raining when Aomine meets Haizaki in the alley. He’s not sure what he looks like, what the expression is on his face, only that it’s mean enough for Haizaki to take the first swing, to decide that it means a fight. Neither of them’s much good; they both land a few hits and even with surprise on Haizaki’s side Aomine’s still a little bigger and it balances out enough until they’re both rolling on the ground and Aomine rolls off, but the awful feelings are still rolling onto him in waves, the dissatisfaction, the feeling that this will never be okay again. Like this was meant to be a catharsis but it had released everything in a tangle. Haizaki looks as bad as Aomine feels, and part of Aomine wants to punch him again, but aren’t they in the same boat here? Aren’t they both alone?  
  
*  
  
“There is no place for you here,” says Akashi.  
  
“Yes, there is,” says Aomine. “He goes, I go."  
  
Haizaki looks at him angry like what now I owe you a fucking favor, and Aomine shrugs. This isn’t a favor for Haizaki; it’s a favor for himself mostly. A reminder that won’t fade when the bruises do, if Tetsu ever stops giving him that awful look.   
  
“Come to practice. Both of you.”  
  
*  
  
Aomine doesn’t have to practice, but Haizaki does; he and Kise are at war every day, but the starting spot’s not up for grabs. Haizaki’s better, still; he’s somehow motivated by the desperate hope that he can grab it back, the hope that Akashi does not dangle over him cruelly like the carefully orchestrated dogfights he’d had Haizaki and Kise doing before. Haizaki’s an extra; he’s no miracle, but he’s pushing Kise to get better and he’s getting better, too, even if he hates coming fof the bench.  
  
“If I’m the sixth man, that makes you seventh,” Haizaki tells Tetsu, as if it’s punching down.  
  
Tetsu just stares at him, cold. Aomine receives his pass in a game, and it doesn’t feel right but it doesn’t feel wrong either, like he's had to hold himself back. Even if he’s getting better at an exponential rate, it doesn’t mean Tetsu can’t keep up because Tetsu’s always been that far behind.   
  
*  
  
Satsuki drags Aomine to the hospital to visit Coach, and it’s hard to see him like that. It’s easier when his grip on Aomine’s hand is strong and he tells Aomine he’s doing a good job. It’s not much, similar words to what Sanada and Akashi have been telling him, but hearing it from Coach makes it seem a little better, a little more real.   
  
*  
  
“Hey, get off the floor,” says Haizaki.  
  
He’s never going to be the type to offer a hand, but it’s no less than he’s shown anyone, something in his eyes that gives Tetsu’s friend the option. He gets up. Meikou’s done, but there are a few seconds on the clock, a pass from Tetsu that goes to Aomine. To Haizaki, a long three he’d stolen off some upperclassman of theirs; the buzzer sounds before it falls through, bouncing and circling around the rim. To make this last just a little bit longer, something they’ll all never have again. 114-9 isn’t a bad finish at all, not to a season like that.


	77. kikasa, unrequited?

Money and looks aren’t everything, but even with all of the trouble they’ve caused him Kise isn’t making any attempts to turn himself poorer or uglier. He still goes to work every day (it’s not like he’d have anything to do if he were retired; work gives him real risk and something interesting, numbers to play with, investments to make) and collects his salary and bonuses; he still does his makeup and gets his hair cut every few weeks in the same style. He still smiles at people when they tell him how wonderful he is; there’s no harm in giving them a little of what they want as long as it’s not a little of himself.   
  
Even among other people with his kind of status, his kind of looks, he’s learned to be careful, to disguise and hide parts of himself, to never tip his hand. It’s a never ending competition, a contest to see who is the first to crack, bonus points for stomping your heel on someone else. There’s a bonus for that that Kasamatsu won’t take, and though Kise doesn’t know him well he appreciates and admires the honesty that’s gotten him so far.  
  
Truthfully, giving no one else a bad thing to say about you is better than stomping all over everyone on your way up. Kise’s played the villain situationally, but it’s mostly been unintentional, some higher-up viewing him favorably in comparison because he’s a quick learner, because he’s pretty and charming and because he does a damn good job. Kasamatsu’s been passed over but worked harder, glad-handed more people, kept the poison out of his words regardless of how much he hates socializing or how much he must resent others.  
  
He’s never shown any interest in Kise, of course. He’s the only one who never has. They’ve had polite exchanges; Kasamatsu’s congratulated him on this promotion or that deal, but that’s been the extent. There’s never been so much as a lingering glance Kise’s way. It’s not the thrill of the chase that has Kise interested; maybe that adds something but it’s not like Kasamatsu giving him any hints would turn Kise off.   
  
Still, though, Kise finds himself staring across the room at another company function, his wine glass almost empty. But this time Kasamatsu looks back, his way. Maybe it’s the wine drained from Kasamatsu’s own glass, or maybe it’s the lighting, but his face appears to flush. And maybe, just maybe, this is it.


	78. aokuro, 50 first dates au

When Aomine wakes up, one thing becomes clear in about five minutes. He can’t remember the last few months, everything at Teikou falling apart. He can’t remember their relationship, caught in that landslide, severed and hanging by a thread. He can’t remember that they’re together in the first place, even though his face lights up when Kuroko tries to remind him.  
  
“Really, Tetsu?”  
  
It’s an expression Kuroko hasn’t seen on Aomine’s face since Kuroko had first said yes himself, and he doesn’t realize he’s crying until Aomine reaches out and pulls him into a hug, and it feels like the beginning all over again.  
  
It’s the beginning all over again every day, though; it’s supposed to clear up—they’re kids, Kuroko thinks; how is Aomine going to grow up? He’s already bad with school; if he can’t really learn anything then what’s the point? If his body can keep up physically in basketball, will it remember all the new moves on its own? If they play the same game together every day, will Aomine always enjoy it?  
  
He does. Every day, Kuroko reminds him that they’re dating; every day they stay late after school or they go to the park to practice more, until Kuroko feels faint and Aomine buys him a treat. It’s always something different, a popsicle or a cold drink but never cola. Kuroko had told Aomine that he didn’t like it on their second date, and some part of him seems to remember that, if not explicitly. It gives Kuroko hope—vain, maybe, that he’ll come back. That he’ll remember all of this, too, everything that had been lost to him.  
  
The funny thing is, this brings everything at Teikou back together, like a massive rewind button. The tape’s still bent and screwed up; it still skips over a few seconds, but they all come to practice and they all want to do well. There is no competition for points; there is much less bitterness. Kuroko doesn’t feel like crying, except when he thinks about all that Aomine’s lost, all that they’ve lost, the memories that now only live in his head—who’s to say they’d happened at all?  
  
“Aomine-kun told me about that,” Momoi says sometimes, a sad smile on her face, and Kuroko knows she misses him, too.  
  
But he’s still here, even if he’s not the way Kuroko had expected him to be. But then, none of this is as expected.


	79. murahimu, circus au

Tatsuya had joined the circus with a clear trajectory in mind, after years of sleight of hand and hustling pool. He’d wanted more, a larger stage to juggle bowling pins on a unicycle and entertain children, to make a more consistent income.   
  
Atsushi had joined the circus because he didn’t know what else to do, and they’d needed a strongman. That gig had lasted about five seconds until they’d found someone with a better personality for it, someone who knew how to rev up the crowd and pretend like he was putting in effort, all steroids and cartoon muscles. But at the time that had been alright with him, and it still is now.   
  
Tatsuya is a patient teacher, rewarding Atsushi with sweets almost like a dog for completing a task, learning to juggle first one then two then three ball,s flicking his wrist the right way to do pins. Not knives yet, though Tatsuya does that so fast Atsushi can barely see the blades, and he doesn’t like it.  
  
“Stick to pins,” he says.  
  
“I’m okay,” says Tatsuya.  
  
He’s okay until he slices off a finger, but he’s not afraid to pull rank and experience and seniority when he has to. It’s a little bit of a dirty game, but it’s allowed, and he doesn’t lean on it like a bulwark of support the way some other performers do, letting it get in the way of better shows and better business models. Tatsuya’s the only person who Atsushi ever voices this opinion to, and Tatsuya dips his shoulders in a shrug.  
  
“Where else are they going to go? What are they going to do? Who’s going to replace them?”  
  
Those questions aren’t his to answer; Atsushi hasn’t thought that far and truthfully he doesn’t really care. Just something better, because they can do better, can’t they?  
  
“You can do better on the unicycle,” says Tatsuya.  
  
Atsushi sighs, but he’s up early practicing anyway. He’s not bad; they can still pull off the routine, and it relies on Tatsuya doing more tricks, carrying the spotlight. Atsushi thinks Tatsuya’s got the right kind of acting ability to be a strongman, even if he’s not quite so big. He can make people believe he is if he talks sweet enough.  
  
“You sure know how to compliment a guy,” says Tatsuya.  
  
“It worked, didn’t it?” says Atsushi.  
  
Because Tatsuya’s still kissing him anyway, so he’s got no room to talk.


	80. takamido, said enough

Midorima keeps his feelings to himself, at least verbally. It’s easy to tell he cares about basketball; that’s maybe the first thing Takao had known about him as a person, the first thing that had made him think twice about holding Midorima up as this faceless rival type even though they were at the same school. He cares about Takao, too—as a friend, yes, but it's the most valuable relationship Takao has right now and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t worried about fucking it up by telling Midorima his own feelings.   
  
Because even if Midorima keeps his feelings buried deeper down than an ocean trench, far below the domain of the anglerfish, and won’t admit them even to himself sometimes, Takao has some things he'd rather hide, too. Nothing sinister, but still something that, were it to come to light in the wrong circumstances, might make things more than a little awkward. Maybe Takao should give Midorima more credit; maybe if Midorima finds out Takao has been thinking about his physique in ways wholly unrelated to how it can help Shutoku win basketball games he’ll tell Takao that he's flattered and he understands, but he’s completely not interested. And maybe he is interested, but Takao keeps on misreading signs because even though he generally tends to look on the bright side, having a crush on your best friend can be kind of demoralizing.   
  
“You don’t talk about your tender feelings much, Shin-chan,” Takao says, trying to keep it light.   
  
“I don’t have tender feelings,” says Midorima. “But, well, my feelings aren’t really anyone’s business—like, toward—”  
  
His face turns a neon pink, like lights downtown, and he pushes up his glasses several times (even though they haven’t slipped at all).  
  
“Toward?" says Takao. “Tell me more.”  
  
“I’ve said too much,” says Midorima. “Excuse me.”  
  
“No, Shin-chan, tell me more,” says Takao. “Toward who? Is there someone you like?”  
  
“That’s,” says Midorima, unfurling his bandaged hands in his lap and then curling them up again, clenching them in a fist. “It doesn’t matter.”  
  
Takao’s not going to push it, not verbally. But from the fidgeting, from the blushing, the avoidance, even with his pessimism it’s got to be him, right?   
  
He places a hand on Midorima’s shoulder; Midorima looks up, eyes wide. Takao leans in to peck his lips, short and to the point. And staying in close, his face only a few centimeters from Midorima’s, he can tell. It’s got to be him.


	81. imahana, scout/college player au

The first half's rough play was just preparation for what’s about to come next. Imayoshi’s seen Hanamiya Makoto and his team too many times not to know their pattern, or at least an approximation of it. It’s not always the same; there’s enough that you can’t predict to keep it from being cracked. The spider web will be there, and Hanamiya himself will come in at some point, and he’s who Imayoshi’s here to see, after all.  
  
Imayoshi reckons he’s already made up his mind about whether he wants Hanamiya for his team or not, but that doesn’t mean he can’t confirm that decision a few times. A little insurance never hurt, and some more time for Imayoshi to talk to Hanamiya would be, well, fun. After all, if they’re going to be working for the same team, they’ll be comrades in arms, so to speak (even if Hanamiya’s a player and Imayoshi’s a scout). And a blunt kid like Hanamiya’s going to need someone to vouch for him, whether he wants it or not (Imayoshi reckons he doesn’t, but it’s a good thing he’s persistent).  
  
Knowing what's going to happen doesn’t spoil Imayoshi in the least. The spiderweb, Hanamiya as the captain and coach, calling his own shots, the other team’s members lost and flat-footed to Hanamiya’s quick thinking and aggressive passing and stealing. Just like that, a few more well-placed elbows (that somehow don’t get called) and the game is over. Perhaps Imayoshi ought to say something about how that kind of dirty play isn’t tolerated in the pros, but Hanamiya knows that’s all lip service. He’s too bright not to, and that’s just going to make him less likely to take Imayoshi up on his offer.  
  
“Hanamiya-kun, so nice to see you again. Congratulations on your win.”  
  
“What do you want?” says Hanamiya.  
  
“That’s a bit rude; I’m here to offer you a job. A position in the pros, what do you say? I’ve given you my card.”  
  
“I looked you up.”  
  
“I’m touched.”  
  
“You seem legit, I guess,” says Hanamiya. “But why should I come with you?”  
  
“Because of my sparkling personality,” says Imayoshi. “And because what we have now is easily molded around you. You should check out our team, not just me.”  
  
“Who says I haven’t?”  
  
Imayoshi shrugs and smiles. “Just think about it, Hanamiya-kun. You have my number.”  
  
He holds out for three days, and Imayoshi would be lying if he said he wasn’t impressed.


	82. murahimu, gargoyle au

There is a certain boy who always passes below Atsushi on his way into the school church. Most people take whichever door is least crowded, but not this one. He’s not one of the ones who pauses on his way, in the middle of some route, to smoke right under Atsushi and cover the air while the smell lingers, but sometimes Atsushi thinks he might like to see him more. A pretty face, hair over one eye, always looking as if he’d thought something lewd. Or perhaps that’s just Atsushi, bored after fifty years of sitting in stone like this.   
  
He gets the chance to ask when the boy stops under the overhang on a rainy day, coming from one of the sports complexes. He doesn’t have an umbrella, and if he thinks the rain’s letting up anytime soon he doesn’t know the area very well. Then again, most of the kids here don’t, and the way they dress, completely inappropriate for the weather, would be comical if Atsushi hadn’t seen it so many times before. This one, though, looks up and seems to meet Atsushi’s gaze. Atsushi doesn’t talk to them very often, but every once in a while he makes an exception.  
  
“You look like you think lewd thoughts in church.”  
  
“You’re bluffing,” says the boy, though he does seem a bit wary that a gargoyle is talking to him.   
  
“What if I’m not? What if you’re just saying that because you do?”  
  
“What if I was? What if I was thinking about you?”  
  
“That’s pretty gross,” says Atsushi (he could quote the words to scriptures about what to do in a house of God, the vibrations imprinted in him time and again over the years, taking up space uselessly in his mind).   
  
“You don’t like that sort of thing?”  
  
“Just because I’m grotesque doesn’t mean I’m a perv. I’m a creature of God.”  
  
“We’re all God’s creatures,” says the boy, a knowing smile on his face.  
  
And God help him, Atsushi actually kind of likes this boy. How long do they last, two years, three? Atsushi’s easy come easy go; they all blend into the next one, but this one doesn’t and he knows it, too. He ends up dashing through the rain without so much as a goodbye, and Atsushi sighs, letting the stone settle around him.  
  
The boy winks at him the next time he’s there, though, and Atsushi lets himself enjoy it.


	83. kagahimu, hockey au

Taiga’s halfway to the tunnel when he hears the sound of whistles blowing, of sticks and pads smacking against the boards, and he’s being basically tugged by the trainer on his bad leg but he stops and turns.  
  
“Come on; doesn’t matter,” says the trainer.  
  
Except it absolutely does matter, when it’s Tatsuya in the middle, Tatsuya who’d flicked his gloves to the ice and is wailing on the number fifty-two for the other team, the guy who had cheap shotted Taiga’s leg. Tatsuya’s fist connects with his face and Taiga feels a rush of admiration, pride, admonishment, worry, all wrapped into one, even more than they always are with Tatsuya on the ice, Tatsuya and his risky physical plays that ought to have broken every bone in his body twelve times over by now but keep on giving him luck.  
  
“Come on. They’ll be fine. And joining you for breaking out into a line brawl before play started.”  
  
Taiga goes; the refs are in there and he can’t see Tatsuya but he hopes Tatsuya’s okay, not even a bloody nose or bruised knuckles. Taiga doesn’t need his honor defended; they’ve gone over this before, and even if that’s how the game is played it’s not like Tatsuya rushes to anyone else’s defense quite like this. And yeah, Taiga does the same for Tatsuya, without thinking, but—still, now, with him out of the game they need Tatsuya to score, to keep them from scoring, to kill their momentum. Five in the box or fifteen and change in the locker room can’t help them there.  
  
He means to tell any or all of that to Tatsuya when they have him on the trainer’s table to check him out, and Tatsuya’s just in there to disinfect his bloody knuckles before taking a nice shower and changing into street clothes early because that’s an automatic misconduct, but Tatsuya rushes to him first.  
  
“Are you okay?”  
  
“Ankle’s twisted. Day-to-day,” says the trainer. “We’ll send him to the hospital for x-rays just to be sure nothing’s broken.”  
  
“What about you?” says Taiga, looking Tatsuya up and down.  
  
His cheek’s going to be bruised; the other guy had gotten him good there, but he looks okay otherwise.  
  
“I’m good. Still got all my teeth.”  
  
Taiga could say something here, something deeper about not getting too caught up in impulses, but Tatsuya’s better than he used to be and the adrenaline’s crashing and all Taiga wants to do right now is wait for the Advil to kick in so he can sleep. He takes Tatsuya’s hand in his.  
  
“Be careful, okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” says Tatsuya. “You, too.”


	84. murahimu, dryad au

It’s not hard to gather information from the other forest spirits. Atsushi’s not particularly adept at gossips, but spirits have loose lips and tend to butt in where they aren’t asked for or needed, and so Atsushi knows more than he should want to about the boy who comes to visit him. Like his name is Tatsuya and he goes to the nearby school, though Atsushi could have guessed that last part. Like he only slumps his shoulders when he’s deeper into the forest, and why should Atsushi care about that?  
  
“You’re sitting under my tree,” Atsushi says, descending from the limbs.  
  
When Tatsuya looks at him, Atsushi wonders if perhaps this has all been some plot to get him down from the tree, to talk with a spirit and ask for some sort of favor, if taking naps here for months and then showing up for five days straight looking more and more tired and sad was supposed to get a spirit’s pity. Kind of a shit strategy, even if it did work, and Atsushi’s about to tell him that.  
  
“You’re…?” Tatsuya says, gesturing up at the tree.  
  
“I’m a dryad,” says Atsushi (like the leaves in his hair, the same purple color, the bark on his legs, the fact that he’d folded up his frame into an oak tree, wouldn’t give the whole damn thing away). “You’ve been sitting under my tree acting like you’re about to cry.”  
  
“I didn’t know it was your tree,” says Tatsuya.  
  
Atsushi sighs.  
  
“I can go somewhere else,” says Tatsuya, with words like ice, frozen in Atsushi’s veins as he sleeps in the cold frost of the winter that never seems to end up here.   
  
He looks quite pretty when he’s angry, and Atsushi doesn’t know that much about humans but he has a feeling that this one would probably try to punch him if he were to say anything like that. So, wisely, Atsushi thinks, he says nothing for the moment, simply shrugging until enough of Tatsuya’s hackles seem lowered just enough.  
  
“You’re allowed to stay, I guess,” says Atsushi.  
  
“Then I will,” says Tatsuya.  
  
Atsushi moves to spring back up into the tree, and then Tatsuya’s hand twitches like he wants to hold Atsushi back, like he wants to raise it and touch him. Atsushi hasn’t made his mind up about Tatsuya yet, but—he shrugs again, glancing at Tatsuya’s hand, and sits down. And Tatsuya sits down next to him.


	85. murahimu, vidcon au

Tatsuya did not come to Vidcon to hook up with anyone. Of course, if it happens, it happens; he’ll be fine (he’s brought enough condoms with him and some extra lube just in case). Alex and Taiga, of course, are assuming that it’s going to be some sort of massive orgy, but with Google execs and twelve-year-olds making up a high percentage of attendees Tatsuya highly doubts it. But he’s ready for anything, playing songs and building his brand and speaking at a musicians’ panel.   
  
He spends most of the flight reviewing videos of the other panelists, people he doesn’t know but is probably expected to. Some of them have come up in comments on his own video, people he’s been suggested to duet with. One has too similar of a sound to him; one does things that are so different he doubts she'd be interested even if he were. Then there’s another, Murasaki, the massive guy with purple hair who’d started off with acoustic guitar solo J-Pop covers and ended up doing his own stuff, some nifty classical-esque guitar mixed with some more modern stuff. He never sings; he never says why; Tatsuya’s gone way too deep into the Wikipedia rabbit hole for someone he’s just got to share a stage with. Even if he is pretty hot, that doesn’t mean he has any interest in hooking up (though there’s no wedding ring on his hand in the videos—that could mean anything, though).  
  
It turns out the shitty lighting and below-average video editing skills do not do Murasaki justice, at all. His hands look huge on the guitar but they’re even larger in person; he’s got to be a foot taller than Tatsuya and his hair really is that color purple. Tatsuya did not come to Vidcon to hook up with anyone, but he’ll be awfully disappointed if he can’t get at least a kiss from Murasaki.  
  
“As pretty as you are, you don’t have to lay it on so thick,” Murasaki says, breath hot on Tatsuya’s ear, one hand up Tatsuya’s shirt.  
  
“I just wanted you to get the message,” says Tatsuya.  
  
“I did,” says Murasaki, and then he kisses him again, tasting like the pitcher of Guinness they’d split between them at the bar downstairs, neither of them beyond tipsy but both of them left with lips slightly numb and sloppy.  
  
“Did you?” Tatsuya says.  
  
Murasaki grinds his hips against Tatsuya’s, and oh, yeah, he definitely did.


	86. murahimu, unreal

Tatsuya’s first impression of Murasakibara Atsushi is that he absolutely cannot be a real person. That stature, that purple hair and bored expression, reads like something out of a parody of a comic book, not even weird enough for the genre straight up. Even among the giants of Yosen he stands taller, dunks harder, blocks every shot within his massive wingspan’s reach. And despite his size he’s graceful; he can get up and down the court fast. He burns with a hatred of losing, practices long and hard, and yet in the actual games he’s content to stay back and let others do the heavy lifting, like some kind of funhouse mirror Allen Iverson.   
  
(There’s the way he eats, sure, that some people point to as evidence of his eccentricity; speaking as someone who has weird eating habits of his own and who has spent a good deal—too much, maybe—of his life around a person who he can’t think about without wanting to wince but who definitely ate more and possibly equally unhealthily, that's not enough to really faze Tatsuya even as part of a larger picture.)  
  
Tatsuya wonders sometimes if he should ask about the purple; he’s heard horror stories of Japanese school dress codes, and hair that long and bright has to be a violation of some sort (then again, no one seems to tell him to take his own hair out of his eye; they’d done that more in America). But the more he wonders, the more Atsushi sticks out in his mind, more a real person than a caricature, a collection of outlandish things. He’s different, sure, even for a school full of hulking basketball players and international students and people who want to stick out. It’s just easier to think of him as unreal if Tatsuya wants to resent him, which he does, kind of.  
  
It’s easy to resent someone who, in such small ways, reminds him of Taiga. It’s easy until he has to be around Atsushi, play with Atsushi, until they pass each other in the halls, until they’re crowned double aces (a cruel joke, Tatsuya thinks, because were Atsushi to want it, he could snatch the crown back and keep it all to himself, only he doesn’t act like he does). Until Atsushi kisses him behind the chapel, his lips dusted with the tang of strawberry Pocky, until Tatsuya admits that all this time he’s wanted to kiss Atsushi back.  
  
It’s easy to think of him as someone who’s not a real person when it helps you hold him at arm’s length. It’s harder to keep real people from getting too close.


	87. nijihimu, shopping

Shopping with Tatsuya is, at this point, basically shopping for himself. It’s not just because it involves Shuuzou picking out things that he knows are going to look good on Tatsuya; it’s not just because he gets to see Tatsuya try on nice clothes even if it’s something he’d never wear (but everything looks good on him, so even when it’s something ridiculous he can always get away with it). They’ve lived together two-plus years; their closets had started out separate but as time wore on and they’d moved into a place with one closet and one dresser to share, most of their clothes have lost any exclusivity they’ve once had. Shuuzou’s short-sleeve button downs find their way onto Tatsuya; Tatsuya’s v-necks fit snugly on Shuuzou’s shoulders; neither of them can remember who had originally owned which jeans because they’d all been bought from the same few stores.  
  
So at this point, buying clothes for Tatsuya is buying clothes for Shuuzou himself, and though he doesn’t always keep that in mind when he picks things out, Tatsuya does. He pulls Shuuzou down to look into the mirror together, the brown and orange of the shirt held against Shuuzou’s face, and frowns.  
  
“I don’t know, Shuu.”  
  
“You look cute,” says Shuuzou. “Get it.”  
  
Tatsuya eyes them both in the mirror. Shuuzou’s wearing a navy button-down, softer and more easily wrinkled than what he usually buys, but the cuffs button just so around his wrists and it fits loose, perfect for wearing over a t-shirt, along with a pair of very uncomfortable khakis that might look good for a hypothetical job interview but definitely aren’t worth it.  
  
“Let me try the other stuff first,” Tatsuya says. “I want to see what I like best.”  
  
They don’t have that much more with them but it takes some time, mostly because they’re both pretty shameless at looking at each other half-clothed in the tiny fitting room, and while Shuuzou keeps in mind that they probably don’t want to get kicked out, he also keeps in mind how good Tatsuya looks even this far away from the middle of the basketball season.  
  
“See something you like?” Tatsuya says, catching Shuuzou’s eye n the mirror.  
  
Shuuzou swallows. “Maybe.”  
  
“We’ll have to fix that, huh,” says Tatsuya, pivoting so he’s looking right at Shuuzou.   
  
Fuck it, one kiss right here isn’t going to get them kicked out.


	88. aokaga, limits

Aomine loves to test Kagami’s patience. It’s like it’s some kind of game to him, screwing around with Kagami like this, like whatever his original objective is, getting on Kagami’s nerves has to have become part of it. He’s gotten messier, leaving his crap in places he knows Kagami will yell at him for it (and still end up picking it up most of the time, because he doesn’t like seeing clutter and mess and for the moment making Aomine be neater isn’t one of the battles he’s picked for himself). He kisses Kagami with morning breath, although that’s not completely, a hundred percent bad, but it still makes Kagami shove him off and roll his eyes (in the scheme of things, that’s minor though). He cops a feel of Kagami’s ass when he walks by and Kagami’s in the middle of cooking, though, his hands full so he can’t properly do anything and that’s—well.   
  
“You have a nice ass, though!” Aomine almost always calls out, and Kagami debates pouring hot vegetables over his head.   
  
And okay, yeah, this isn’t the only set of limits Aomine pushes Kagami to, but it feels like it sometimes (and it’s probably the farthest and most consistent out of all of them, anyway), and maybe it’s a sign of their compatibility that even though it bothers Kagami it’s not in a particular way where his irritation builds up over time. Aomine’s kind of a dick, but it’s not like Kagami’s some sort of angelic saint who can't give as good as he gets when it comes to this kind of thing. He can push Aomine’s buttons, too, even though he doesn’t do it all the time in the same ways.   
  
They push each other to their limits in other ways, stupid competitions they goad each other into, playing streetball late at night when Kagami really wants to go in but one more contest has turned into five and Kagami doesn’t want to be the first one to give in. Or when they go out shopping and Kagami points out something to Aomine in a window display that Aomine would like, Aomine decides that it must mean he’s got to find more things that are even more well-suited to Kagami. It’s pretty dumb a lot of the time; Kagami says that from the inside looking out. But there’s no one else he’d rather be with.


	89. aokuro, make it up

“I fucked up,” says Aomine. “I’m sorry, Tetsu.”  
  
“I know you are,” says Tetsu.   
  
“Let me make it up to you,” says Aomine. “I know there’s no making up that, but I’m serious.”  
  
Tetsu doesn’t say no.  
  
*  
  
Aomine’s got to seize the opportunities where he sees them. He meets Tetsu after practice but that’s just a small thing, walks him home and doesn’t try to bother his other friends. He listens to them and tries to get along, even though they have very little in common. It’s harder to be abrasive when you keep your mouth shut, and the last few blocks are always just him and Tetsu and they always leave Aomine in a good mood when he turns back and walks the other way home.   
  
The fifth time he does it, he buys a milkshake from McDonald’s, vanilla because Tetsu likes it. He eats a medium thing of fries on the way over and decides that it probably wasn’t worth the price, but the stop was worth it to see Tetsu accept the shake with less than a smile but more than a frown, and a thank you. Aomine would like to casually put his arm around Tetsu’s shoulders again, but he knows it’s too soon; he knows this is only the beginning of a twisted pat through the forest back to the main road. It’s a challenge he’s up for, though.   
  
*  
  
Cheering Tetsu on in games is fun, especially when Aomine goes all out and lets himself be more obnoxious and loud and obviously there for Tetsu. Every pass, every basket, even when he loses sight of Tetsu on the court he knows he’s there.   
  
“Are you going to stop this once you think you’ve done enough?” Tetsu says, after Seirin loses to Seihou.  
  
“It’s never going to be enough,” says Aomine (not like this is the answer to some trick question, just because that’s the real answer, right or wrong).   
  
Tetsu lets Aomine kiss him then, in the narrow hallway outside the locker room at Seihou.  
  
*  
  
It still hasn’t been enough; Aomine still picks Tetsu up from practice and walks him home. He still buys him milkshakes (sometimes chocolate or strawberry for himself, too, and even though Tetsu claims to not like those flavors Aomine lets him share) and he still shows up to games. He drops his arm around Tetsu’s shoulders sometimes, holds his hand under the table when they go to a fast food place. They still aren’t there, wherever there is, but they're on their way.


	90. imahana, fight or make out

Hanamiya’s senior year goes better than Imayoshi’s expecting it to, though perhaps he ought to give his underclassman more credit where it’s due. He’s certainly smart and ambitious, though he’s always been that way; it does no good other than to somehow stroke Hanamiya’s ego (hasn’t he tired of hearing the most basic truths about himself, traits that may not always be spoken in a positive light—though there’s Imayoshi’s answer, he reckons) if Imayoshi says that, so he’s not going to. It’s redundant at this point, as is anything about violence or the spiderweb.  
  
“A well-coached game, Hanamiya-kun.”  
  
“What are you doing here?” Hanamiya says. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to watch high school games, creep?”  
  
Imayoshi hums. “Don’t be so down on yourself.”  
  
“I’m not,” Hanamiya snaps. “But you have, like, school. And your own basketball.”  
  
“Doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about the future.”  
  
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“You’re smart, Hanamiya-kun.” (Well there goes not saying that.) “You figure it out.”  
  
Hanamiya huffs, crossing his arms over his chest as if in an effort to appear taller than Imayoshi, though he still isn’t. It’s a nice try, though; Imayoshi would commend him for his effort if he didn’t think (or know, really) that this would start a fight or something close to that. He purses his lips and Hanamiya squints at him.  
  
“I can’t tell if you want to fight me or make out with me,” says Imayoshi. “I’m getting some really mixed signals here, so I reckon…both?”  
  
“Shut up,” Hanamiya says, crossing his arms even tighter but refusing to look at Imayoshi’s eyes, glancing away at a no smoking sign on the wall as if it’s the most interesting object he’s ever seen in his life.  
  
“I have to say,” Imayoshi says. “I’d prefer the second option. A little less violent, a little less likely to end up with us injured or doing something we regret.”  
  
“That’s what you think,” says Hanamiya, and oh, he is so cute if he thinks he’s going to carve Imayoshi up like a practiced chef with a classic slab of meat.  
  
“I should go, though,” says Imayoshi. “You’re right, of course, that I have stuff that might be a little more big time than high school basketball. Classes, homework, practice, that fun stuff.”  
  
“Hey,” says Hanamiya, but Imayoshi’s already turned, waving over his shoulder.  
  
“You know my number!”


	91. murahimu, shirt

The first time Atsushi can’t find his shirt, he shrugs it off. It’s not one he really cares about; his brother’s always telling him about the dangers of losing things in the laundry and while Atsushi’s pretty sure he recalls folding it the last time he’d done laundry he can’t be totally positive, so really the only thing to do there is not to tell his brother. He also could have misplaced it in his room, taken it home the last time he went and left it in his room there, stuck it in the back of his locker. It would be nice to have it, but he's got other shirts to wear for now.  
  
The second time, he’s a little more pissed off, because while he’s not the tidiest person his stuff’s actually generally organized, and he doesn’t often lose track of it (it’s kind of hard when the dorm room is this tiny, too). He actually likes this shirt better, the orange one with the bear on it, and he’ll know it if it turns up anywhere else. It wouldn’t fit anyone else, except for a couple of the first years he’s pretty sure are still scared of him (which is a little amusing but has gotten old really quickly), or Liu, who would never wear anything like that.  
  
The person who has it is not one of those people, but Atsushi supposes he should have guessed he’d go into Tatsuya’s room to corral him for the search and find him sleeping in a shirt several sizes too big for him and nothing else. There’s something a bit cute about it, Atsushi supposes, but it’s balanced out by the fact that he wants to wear this shirt right now.  
  
“Hey,” Atsushi says, sitting down on the bed and shaking Tatsuya’s shoulder.  
  
Tatsuya rolls over, blinks, and smiles at him like it’s going to wash away everything and he’s pretty but he’s not that pretty. Atsushi looks at him, then looks at the shirt that goes down to the middle of Tatsuya’s thighs.   
  
“You’re wearing my shirt.”  
  
“Do you want it back?”  
  
“Yeah,” says Atsushi. “I was looking for it.”  
  
Tatsuya, tease that he is, takes off the shirt right there so that he’s sitting naked in the bedcovers. Atsushi pulls off the shirt he’s wearing and leaves it there (if Tatsuya doesn’t want to wear his own clothes, he can wear that one), pulling the other back on. It feels good, warm and soft on his skin, and it smells like Tatsuya. Maybe there’s something to this after all.  
  
“Ask next time,” Atsushi says.  
  
But now that he doesn’t have a shirt to search for, he doesn’t have much to do, so really Tatsuya’s got the right idea. Atsushi lies down on the bed next to him and pulls the covers over both of them.


	92. murahimu + taiga, wrong number

Tatsuya’s got an off-day and Atsushi doesn’t; it might be nice for him to get back to a sext after practice (really, it won’t; he’ll pull over to a rest stop on the way back home and try to have phone sex but end up complaining to Tatsuya and then getting back later, but maybe this time’s the charm). Or maybe today’s one of the days he’s going to take his phone with him into the shower and jerk it with his fist in his mouth (as rare as they are). Tatsuya sits back on the bed, typing and deleting and retyping across the screen. What should he lead with? Asking Atsushi what he’s wearing is too boring, and likely to end up with Atsushi replying that that’s dumb and Tatsuya knows what he’s wearing (and, well, Tatsuya had watched him put it on so he’s got no excuse). He could say he’s lying in bed like a present for Atsushi, that he’d written Atsushi’s name in lube on his cock, but no. Then again, there's something there.  
  
 _there’s a present waiting in bed for u when u get back…but i can open it early if u want ;)  
it’s my cock and it has ur name on it_  
  
His phone vibrates two seconds after he puts it to sleep, with a new message from Taiga, of all people.  
  
 _WHAT THE FUCK TATSUYA_  
  
Tatsuya scrolls up and, oh. Shit.  
  
 _sorry that was for atsushi just delete it_  
  
 _delete it???? after its burned into my retinas???? what the fuck check who you send that shit to what if i was ur agent_  
  
 _i’d apologize to her too…and she never texts me anyway_  
  
 _did you not check the last message in the conversation_  
  
Tatsuya sighs. He hadn’t; he’d certainly meant to tap his thumb on the conversation with Atsushi, where the last topic was whether they needed any more whole milk, not the one with Taiga, where they’d last talked about fantasy basketball.  
  
 _fwiw i really am sorry_  
  
 _i never want to hear about your sex life again_  
  
Tatsuya hadn’t planned on telling him that much, if anything, so he just puts his phone to sleep again. He’s completely out of the mood for sex right now, so he can watch some TV and take a nap and wait for Atsushi to come back and put him in the mood if he wants it.  
  
Two episodes into a marathon of some sitcom with an overly-loud laugh track, Tatsuya’s phone vibrates again, a message from Atsushi.  
  
 _y did u sext kagami if we add a third person its not gonna be him_  
  
 _i meant to text u instead sorry_  
who were u thinking tho


	93. takamido + yuuya, tension

It’s a lovely day in the spring, the lovely days the captain of Shutoku often spends complaining about having to bother with the annoying underclassmen, but here he’s called Midorima aside after practice anyway.  
  
“Listen,” says Miyaji, brushing a speck dust off the bottom of his school shirt. “It’s okay that you like him. That’s fine, cute, whatever, I’m not going to stop you from pursuing it. But you have to do something or not do something, nopt just keep everyone in this limbo of awkward tension, okay?”  
  
Midorima blinks. “Like who?”  
  
Miyaji’s mouth falls open. “Are you—of course not, you’re Midorima—it’s Takao, you dumbass! You like Takao, don’t you?”  
  
“What,” says Midorima. “Why would I like Takao?”  
  
“Because you buy him his lucky item? On particularly unlucky days for Scorpio? You make sure he has it with him. You can say you’re just friends all you want, but you have other friends and you don’t buy them lucky items. You don’t buy them for any of your teammates, either—and I don’t want one, so don’t even try it. I’m just saying.”  
  
“But we are just friends,” says Midorima. “Takao is a good friend, and a good teammate, but I don’t want to, ah. Date him.”  
  
“You’re stuttering over it,” says Miyaji. “You like him. You just won’t admit it.”  
  
“I really don’t,” says Midorima, but it tumbles from his mouth thick like the lies he can never make himself tell.   
  
Maybe he’s just let Miyaji psych him out; he doesn’t really like Takao. He can’t; that doesn’t make sense. It’s not like there’s anyone else he does like, or thinks he should like—whoever does end up dating Takao will be a lucky person. It’s just, well, not him. That’s impossible and it doesn’t make sense.  
  
“Fuck,” says Miyaji. “Forget I said anything; I thought you knew…”  
  
“What if I do like Takao?” Midorima says.  
  
Miyaji sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, and it’s not like he’s Midorima’s first choice when it comes to advice either, but here they are.   
  
“Then you tell him,” says Miyaji. “Or decide you don’t want to pursue it. But do something about it, okay? If he breaks your heart I’ll kick him in the balls but I think he likes you, too.”  
  
“He does?”  
  
“Why else would he put up with that level of bullshit from you? The rest of us do, too, but he’s like, on another level with the rickshaw and everything.”  
  
“That’s been since last year.”  
  
“He’s probably liked you since then, dumbass.”  
  
“Oh,” says Midorima.


	94. murahimu, cooking

On Monday night Tatsuya cooks lasagna. It’s a very nice lasagna, with more layers than Atsushi’s ever had in a restaurant, meat and spinach and all kinds of cheese oozing out. It’s messy, and Atsushi’s pretty swayed by presentation, but he’s more swayed by the taste (and messy is what he’s come to expect from Tatsuya in every aspect). It’s good, and Tatsuya looks satisfied when Atsushi says it, satisfied when Atsushi kisses tomato sauce off his lips. Still, Atsushi’s quite sure he can do better than that to make Tatsuya satisfied with his cooking.  
  
He makes gyoza the next night, phone between his cheek and his shoulder as his mother tells him, without being in the same room, that he’s doing it wrong, that his wrappers are too thick and the meat’s going to fall out and there’s no way he’s going to cook them evenly if he does it like that (it’s like her ears have eyes). Atsushi’s mother is used to making enough for their entire family, though, and while Atsushi and Tatsuya eat a lot they don’t eat that many (Atsushi suggests sending them to Kagami; Tatsuya says that he makes his own a hundred at a time). They end up storing the rest, and it’s kind of a failure insofar as there’s way too much food, although Tatsuya says it tastes good and gives Atsushi a smile and takes a good chunk of the rest in for lunch.  
  
Tatsuya makes them both gyudon the next night, tender beef and perfect rice; he doesn’t have to call anyone though he has been annotating a recipe printed from some website. There’s just enough for both of them to have a bowl, which isn’t enough for seconds and Atsushi wants more. Leftover gyoza are less appetizing, and he knows that’s been Tatsuya’s plan all along.  
  
“You play dirty,” Atsushi grumbles.  
  
“Didn’t you enjoy dinner, though?” says Tatsuya.  
  
Atsushi has Thursday off, so he figures he’s got time to do better after his morning nap. Like buying a whole chicken to roast, which seems like a good idea at the supermarket but a terrible one when he actually has to go through with cooking it. It’s a pain, but he thinks about the gyudon and Tatsuya’s face, so pleased with victory, so pleased with food—it’s enough of a motivation to keep going.   
  
The chicken is a success, perfectly-roasted, and Tatsuya sucks the last bits of meat from the wing bones as Atsushi tries not to look too triumphant. Other people would probably call it a draw here, but Atsushi won’t, and across the table there’s that familiar glint in Tatsuya’s eye. If they both keep one-upping each other and they both get to eat good food, even on the nights he loses he gets a pretty good consolation prize.


	95. murahimu, nonsense

Himuro does not make sense. His futile efforts to elevate his basketball are annoying; he’s never going to be good enough no matter how hard he tries. Work can get you somewhere but it won’t open a door without a key; you’ll only hurt yourself throwing your body against it. It’s counterproductive; somewhere along the line he’s going to overwork himself and then Murasakibara’s going to have to carry the weight of the offense, too, which is going to be a pain. And, well, considering pain, isn’t Himuro in enough of it already?  
  
The specifics are too complicated, only the way Himuro looks down sometimes, the cracks in his facade that no one looks at closely enough to see, but when you glance at a certain angle they become apparent and you can’t stop seeing them. Murasakibara can’t, anyway, rewinding the moment in his mind of Himuro punching him, the way his face had shattered. A set of complex feelings toward Kagami, of all people, tying Murasakibara back into some stupid rivalry he’d never wanted to be a part of. But as many moving parts as there are, as much as Himuro’s like a delicate sort of machine, it’s simple, too, the way that Himuro looks more or less like he could throw himself down a flight of stairs any second and break half the bones in his body, look up and smile and pretend he’s okay.   
  
That’s dumb and it doesn’t make any sense; there’s no way he would actually do it, but there’s a sense of risk, Himuro running his thumb along the moving air at the edge of a chainsaw, that even if he doesn’t intend for it to happen he’ll lean too far on the railing and it will fall and send him tumbling down. Murasakibara doesn’t like this kind of metaphor; the idea that something like that could happen to Himuro gives him a deeper sort of uneasiness, even if it’s all something figurative.   
  
That’s not why Murasakibara kisses him; he can’t lie to himself with a straight face like that. It’s part of why, maybe, but only a sliver at the edge; it’s not like he’s got some kind of savior complex and it’s not like he thinks Himuro’s going to intentionally hurt himself and this is the way to stop it, to distract him or solve all the issues he’s constructed for himself in his head. It’s not going to make Himuro stop hating himself even if he knows Murasakibara likes him. The cracks on his mask are further apart when he lowers himself down onto his heels, but for the moment he does look a little less than sad.


	96. kagahimu, road trip

“We should travel around the world,” Taiga had said, and he’d sort of meant it as a someday pipe dream, maybe type thing.   
  
Alex always says that someday never comes, and Tatsuya takes her words to heart; maybe the world is impossible for one summer but across the country, hitting up a good chunk of the continental United States, starting in New York and ending up back home in LA, is a good start. (Knowing Tatsuya, he’d probably figured he could work his way up to the world, get it all down in one summer, but Taiga’s preemptively made it clear that just a slice of one continent is way more than enough for now.)  
  
They travel down the coast, skipping most of the big cities they’ve been to too many times already, if only from hotels to arenas to the same four and five star restaurants (and fast food places, Taiga will admit). It reminds Taiga too much of the grind of the season; this is traveling at their own pace, with their own objectives, just to see and be with each other.   
  
They stop for gas in Georgia when a man about to exit late middle age approaches Tatsuya.  
  
“Tatsuya Himuro? Big fan. We need more kids like you who play the game hard, with good fundamentals.”  
  
“Thank you, sir,” says Tatsuya, a brief nod of the head.   
  
“Keep it up. Think about coming to the Hawks, huh. We could really make a run of it.”  
  
Tatsuya’s still smiling when he gets back in the car, gas receipt tucked into his pocket, and he’s got the door halfway shut before he stops himself.  
  
“Need anything from the mini-mart?”  
  
“Nah, I’m good,” says Taiga.  
  
Tatsuya looks so damn cute when he’s pleased; Taiga knows he doesn’t need to tell him not to move to Atlanta because that’s even farther away (not that considering divisions it really matters) and they only have one team so there would be fewer chances to see each other every year, and okay, Tatsuya shouldn’t base his career choices on catering to Taiga, but still. He kind of wants to tell him that anyway, but he reaches over to hug Tatsuya instead.  
  
“I’m so happy,” he says.  
  
“Me too, Taiga,” says Tatsuya, smile sticking to his voice like fresh pink gum on the sidewalk to the bottom of Taiga’s shoe.  
  
Taiga dozes off as they drift through the farmlands and the sunset approaches; he really is glad that all of this had happened to Tatsuya, and to him, to the two of them together.


	97. murahimu, soft

Atsushi’s hair is soft between Tatsuya’s fingers; he’d comb through all of it like this if Atsushi would let him and if they had the time. His fingertips brush against the roots, against Atsushi’s scalp, and Atsushi sighs like he can’t get enough of this feeling.  
  
“Keep doing that.”  
  
“Okay,” says Tatsuya.   
  
It’s better, he thinks, that Atsushi’s hair is even longer now, that he’s refused to cut it (he doubts Atsushi cares too much in either direction, but when so many people are asking him when he’s going to cut his hair because it’s getting so long now, sheer contrarianism is keeping him from hacking off a few inches with scissors himself). And it looks better, too, when it’s long enough that he has to keep it up in a ponytail or some semblance of a bun to keep it out of his eyes, out of his face and his food when he’s eating. It’s nice to see his neck, to stand in practice and call him over to ask his opinion even when Liu says they probably don’t need it, to see the shape of it exposed. Atsushi probably knows what Tatsuya’s doing, but he hasn’t stopped Tatsuya from doing it, and why would he when he likes that kind of attention?  
  
(“This isn’t appropriate,” he says when Tatsuya’s hand touches his thigh in chapel, but sometimes he’s the one reaching out to touch Tatsuya’s thigh, too.)  
  
Atsushi would look good with his hair braided, but Tatsuya’s no good at that; he’d mess it up and tie it in knots and pull it the wrong way and even though this is pretty relaxing he doubts it would be if it was all knots, and if Atsushi were struggling at all. Every strand is fine between Tatsuya's fingertips, a translucent purple under the overhead light. Tatsuya leans down to kiss the top of Atsushi’s head, and when he pulls back up he sees Atsushi’s nose is wrinkled. He laughs.  
  
“Not funny, Muro-chin.”  
  
Atsushi tilts his head back, his hair cascading through Tatsuya’s fingers and tickling his palms, craning his neck to look at Tatsuya’s face. Tatsuya smiles at him, and Atsushi tries to scowl but the look comes of as more comical than anything.  
  
“Go back to doing what you were doing before.”  
  
“Okay,” says Tatsuya.   
  
Sometimes Atsushi's easy to spoil, easy to keep relatively pleased. Tatsuya always likes a challenge, but this kind of thing is nice, too.


	98. kiyohana, stuck

They’re probably stuck together at this rate. There’s some stupid fucking proverb about keeping your enemies closer than your friends, and maybe they’d heeded that a little too closely, or maybe Teppei had done this just to spite him. Knowing him, he would, all reckless smiles and laughter hiding poison, a shitty mask of papier mache that somehow no one sees through except for Makoto.   
  
It’s not like Makoto hadn’t had a hand in any of this. So to speak, though that’s not the body part that’s the problem, not feet and legs and knees, Teppei lying on the ground like that, giving Makoto the look that says he’d just fallen for a trick, that perhaps it looks like he’s winning this round but like Teppei thinks that’s given him the means to win the whole damn thing. It’s not like it's anywhere near close to over, but it had, perhaps, allowed Teppei to pull ahead in some ways. Claim the moral high ground, as if Makoto had ever wanted that (and yet, compared to some of Teppei’s shitty teammates, perhaps he has it).   
  
If he were to punch Teppei in the face right now, Teppei would probably grin with a bloody nose and it would be the smuggest goddamn thing Makoto’s ever seen. And still.  
  
Teppei knows more about him than Makoto ever intended to let him know, the goody two shoes captain of that annoying team, demoralized and floundering around Teppei like leeches about to shrivel up out of the water. The one who had supposedly stood on his level, the backhanded compliment of a title none of them had asked for. The two of them who had stayed in Tokyo, with no interest in joining the others. The two of them, linked game after game, time after time, until their strands are so snarled together they’d have to cut off all of their limbs to separate.   
  
Makoto used to have no doubt Teppei would do it to him if he thought there was something to be gained, but Teppei always stays. Maybe he’s resigned to fate, like it’s some all-knowing entity; maybe he thinks this is going to bother Makoto more if he just keeps it like that. He’s probably right, and Makoto hates him even more--although, maybe, hate is the wrong word. It’s not strong enough, though Makoto will never say out loud to Teppei that he thinks their relationship is anything out of the ordinary.


	99. imayoshi & susa + imaao

“What would you have done if Aomine had said no?”  
  
The sky is grey; the spring is full of rain but the sky has not yet opened. Most of the student population of Touou has taken the hint and stayed indoors for lunch, but Imayoshi and Susa are standing under a low overhang, eating the same food for the third lunch in a row (that’s what Susa hates the most about making his own food, that he has to make it in bulk and shovel the same damn food down his throat until it’s gone, that he’s locked into something without a choice—it’s not like he’d had much variety when he’d gotten a bento from his mother every morning, but he could always ask for something. And it's the principle, of making it and knowing that’s how long it’s going to last, of being forced into this by himself. All this time he’s been thinking and Imayoshi still hasn’t answered the damn question.  
  
“You don’t know,” says Susa. “Good strategy, Captain.”  
  
“Well,” says Imayoshi. “I reckon it was. Don’t we have the ace of the Generation of Miracles on our team?”  
  
“Yeah,” says Susa. “But just say he didn’t like it right off the bat. Could you have convinced him…made an appeal to Momoi or something?”  
  
“She’s too smart for that,” says Imayoshi. “Here, Susa, take this broccoli.”  
  
“Eat your own food. Don’t change the subject.”  
  
Imayoshi pushes the broccoli to the edge of his bento and picks up another chunk of rice. “Momoi would know if it wasn’t the best place for him, and the best place for him is where he figures out it is. It’s awfully hard to get his attention these days, you know; you can’t just promise him he can play basketball.”  
  
“Well, the zone.”  
  
“Yeah,” says Imayoshi. “But even for a guy like him, that might not be a lot.”  
  
“You sound awfully chipper for a guy whose plan had no backups and was built on a faulty foundation.”  
  
“Who said I didn’t have any backups? Susa, you wound me.”  
  
“What was your backup plan, give him a blow job and say there’s more where that came from?”  
  
“Don’t be vulgar, Susa.”  
  
“Don’t avoid the subject.”  
  
“Don’t give up all your secrets, even to your own vice captain.”  
  
Susa snorts, but doesn’t push it further. Imayoshi probably hadn’t had a backup plan, but he’s the one who’d said the primary plan had worked, and he'd been right. Lunch is over soon; it’s beginning to rain.


	100. kiyohana, fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> semi-graphic fire imagery

You can’t lay the blame when the ashes are burning around you, when it’s all collapsing still, when the fire is reflected in your eyes. Teppei’s got more than a suspicion that it’s going to fall on both of them, because it already has. Makoto will try to push a great deal of it onto Teppei after the fact because that's what he does; it’s never his fault and it’s the worst way to be stubborn. The teeth that he bares so casually, the holes they heave ripped. Teppei will not take on that burden; maybe it’s irresponsible of him but he’s sick of being responsible for Makoto’s shit, sick of being responsible for his own. He’ll let those ashes fall between them, and Makoto can stumble under the weight or choke as it falls on him. That’s his responsibility; that's what happens when your paths diverge, take sharp turns in the opposite directions.  
  
In hindsight, they were too stubborn, too alike, too willing to set each other on fire. This isn’t even hindsight yet, but it’s close enough for it to be too obvious and too late. A bad ending for a bad relationship, not bad in all the ways Teppei’s friends had warned him about. Like he was naive, like he didn’t know Makoto better than anyone does. Like Makoto hadn’t known Teppei better than anyone does, even now. Even now, they can twist the knives like screws that need a little bit of tightening, light the charred ends of the matches again so they burn brighter and hotter, leave darker welts on each other’s skins.   
  
It had felt so real until it had felt so fake, like something they were pushing for, something they were too stubborn to admit wasn’t working. A car with the engine screeching and smoking, until it had finally caught on fire, a chain reaction explosion hurling them both from the vehicle. No outward signs of damage, and they’re not bleeding from the inside out. They’re just on opposite sides of the highway now, and is the fire in their eyes from the wreck or is it from inside of them, the things they’d lit in each other or the things they’d thought they’d lit but were burning from the start?  
  
But they’ve burned all the bridges between them by now, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just the two of them and their separate insurance claims, nursing their wounds alone.


	101. momoalex, amazing

The air is heavy with the sounds of cicadas, lethargic as the summer dies away, bringing the slight relief of fall and its cool fronts, or at least the promise of that, soon. Satsuki taps her clipboard with the end of her pen, and she can see Alex tuck a lock of hair behind her ear as an excuse to look at her. What is she looking for, though? Satsuki’s nominally trying to piece together data on a few streetball players, but she’s already figured it out and gotten it in her head (to be transferred to the paper when she’s ready to explain it all, which isn’t right now). What she’s really studying is Alex, another attempt to find out what Alex really wants.  
  
She’d say Alex isn’t really sure herself, but her intuition tells her that’s the wrong answer, the easy way out. Maybe Alex isn’t sure of what she intends to do, but what she wants—is it Satsuki’s analytical abilities, on her side? Someone to talk about basketball with? Or something entirely unrelated, the thing that makes Satsuki glance in the mirror before she leaves the house an extra time or two, consider getting an actual haircut for the first time in years, dab perfume on her wrists and under her neck?  
  
This is passing the territory of an awkward passing crush and entering the place where it takes a firmer hold, where it’s harder to shake off. Where Satsuki’s used to the feeling of her stomach lifting when she watches Alex play, when Alex wrinkles her nose when she’s about to sneeze. Where she’s catalogued all of the millions of little things about Alex in her mind, and thinks of them with a certain kind of fondness, a fondness that she both hopes is reciprocated and is a little—not afraid. She’s never afraid of things like that. But it leaves her at a crossroads, a place she’s not used to being.   
  
A safe crush like Tetsu won’t like her back. Someone else will like her, place her on a pedestal or view her as a threat or a rival before anything else. Satsuki knows she’s formidable, but that doesn’t mean she’s peerless. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want someone to stand on her level, the way Alex does, never treating her like she’s a princess or like she’s taking over something of Alex’s, like they’re competing for the scraps. Alex shares with her, the implication that Satsuki will share back, and that’s been a given from the start. It’s like she’s a high-hanging fruit, falling right into Alex’s lap, only Alex has only maybe noticed.  
  
But the maybe turns to definitely when she turns back to Satsuki.  
  
“You’re done already, aren’t you?”  
  
Satsuki nods. “You got me.”  
  
And Alex offers a hand.


	102. aohimu, drunk in love

Tatsuya’s pretty amazing; it’s kind of why Daiki fell for him in the first place. He could talk for hours (and he’s pretty sure he has; he’s pretty sure that’s why whenever they’re both kind of tipsy and at the same league social events Murasakibara starts walking in the other direction) about Tatsuya’s basketball, the way he wills the ball through the hoop, the way he’s got something totally different from Daiki, something that’s definitely less but he knows how to overclock it, how to uncheck his power; he knows his own body well enough to subvert its pitfalls, to make up for the shortcomings he’s studied over and over again. It’s awfully hard for an opponent to exploit his weakness when he’s beating you by exploiting it in the first place, isn’t it?  
  
It’s pretty damn hard for Daiki sometimes, even when he’s throwing all his power right back at Tatsuya, and Tatsuya knows how to take it without flinching. He’s fucking amazing, soft hands like that, a soft smile he’d given Daiki for the first time when he’d thought Daiki wasn’t looking (and that probably wasn’t the first time, just the first time Daiki had caught him). The way his voice sounds on a phone call when he’s sinking into the mattress in a hotel room, when he’s falling asleep or when he’s keeping Daiki up with one hand shoved down the front of his pants.   
  
And he can cook, and he’s great in the sack, and he’s so goddamn pretty (and vain about it, too, but if anyone has a right to be it’s him), so poised even when he’s about to fall apart (and fuck, does Daiki enjoy it the few times he’s made Tatsuya fall apart in his arms, except for that one time when they both cried but that was different).   
  
Tatsuya can also down half a bottle of Fireball in one go, chug it like it’s water or Gatorade and he’s just been out up and down the floor with no time outs or substitutions for half a quarter, or like he’s a frat boy at a party with watery keg beer. He doesn’t grimace; his face doesn’t move; he pours it down his throat and kisses Daiki all numbness and cinnamon afterward, pulling Daiki’s face down to his.  
  
He doesn’t get sad or shy or angrier than usual; he can be a trigger-happy drunk sometimes but tonight he just pulls a little more on Daiki’s hand, a little bit cuter and a little bit more clingy. Daiki wakes up sober, though, and Tatsuya wakes up with a massive hangover.


	103. kagahimu, cruel metaphor

It’s got nothing to do with Taiga and everything to do with Taiga, everything to do with the ring around Tatsuya’s neck, the chain repaired to weigh ten times as much as it ever did when it was intact. Severed, a cruel metaphor; what has been rebuilt will never be the same, the newer links shining with the wrong kind of sheen, obvious. But all that had passed between them, all of the things that had made Tatsuya tear it off his neck, tear down the bonds they had carefully preserved with a few well-placed words like a sharp sword through the most convoluted of knots, all of it had had everything and nothing to do with Taiga.  
  
Mostly, it had all been about Tatsuya (of course it had, making everything about himself all over again, even when he’d been considering Taiga it had always flipped around back to him, and he was never fit to be a big brother if he’s going to be like this, never fit to have that kind of selflessness). It had been about his inadequacies, as Taiga had risen like the sun to meet his destiny, light shining through the holes in his fabric that had been hidden or barely there in the low light. They are now harsh; he cannot hide them from himself, from Taiga, from anyone, and that he wishes to, that this is all about him fixing the fabric that a needle will not pass through—well, it feeds itself.  
  
But it’s got everything to do with Taiga, the ring that lies cold at the base of Tatsuya’s neck; he wakes up with it clutched in his head, his eyelashes wet and his throat sore. Taiga’s gone and haunting Tatsuya’s dreams, his face and his voice and the pure happiness and excitement of the way he played, the things Tatsuya would pay all his blood to see again. He doesn’t deserve it; he doesn’t deserve the chance to apologize; there’s no way he can blame Taiga for not accepting it, even though he probably would anyway, because he’s Taiga (or maybe this had been one bridge too far and they’d all come tumbling down, the bent and torn trust between them enough of a reminder). If it wasn’t about Taiga, Tatsuya would sit here forever, clutching at the remnants of things he had once hoped for, but it is about Taiga. Whether Tatsuya deserves forgiveness or not, that’s not based in fairness, it's up to Taiga to decide, and this time Tatsuya will let him choose.


	104. kagahimu, ghost trip

Taiga is not exactly thrilled. The proposition of going on a ghost hunting trip is nothing he’d ever be excited about, but something that involved paranormal activity in broad daylight he could maybe handle. This, though, a trip full of nights in the woods and deep rural areas, sounds like a horror movie combined with that stupid test of courage he’d had to do back in high school multiplied by some insane factor. Yeah, it’s Tatsuya's thing but definitely not his.  
  
“Nope. Not gonna do it.”  
  
“Okay,” says Tatsuya. “I figured you wouldn’t, but thanks for considering it.”  
  
“Sure,” says Taiga.   
  
Taiga puts the brochure aside, and Tatsuya resumes digging through the fridge; it’s decently organized but Taiga’s not sure what he’s looking for or if they even have it.  
  
“Are you going to go anyway?” Taiga says.  
  
“On the ghost trip? Nah. Wouldn’t want you worried about me.”  
  
Taiga makes a face. “Tatsuya.”  
  
“Sorry,” says Tatsuya, turning back to look at him, smiling in a way that says he means it at least halfway (and that he’s not trying to make Taiga feel bad about either of them missing out on anything).   
  
*  
  
The weekend of the ghost trip comes; the brochure’s long since been placed out with the rest of the recycling. Tatsuya had circled the date on the calendar, though he hadn't marked anything on it, or maybe he’d circled it because his credit card bill’s due, too, but the date had stuck in Taiga’s mind like a loose sheet of paper sucked onto an open air vent, flat against the metal and too big to fit.   
  
“I wouldn’t have been mad if you’d gone,” Taiga says.  
  
“Huh?” says Tatsuya  
  
“That ghost hunting trip.”  
  
“Oh,” says Tatsuya. "I'm sorry I made you think it was a big deal.”  
  
He kisses Taiga soft and slow and sweet and, okay, yeah, this isn’t a distraction kiss or a rather be searching for paranormal activity kiss. It’s a real one, where Tatsuya presses his chest to Taiga and wraps his arms around Taiga’s waist and Taiga feels like his heartbeat’s the same pace but a little deeper, rattling harder against his ribcage.   
  
“You don’t get scared by _Supernatural_ , right?” says Tatsuya.  
  
“Ha, ha,” says Taiga. “You can watch your show.”  
  
Tatsuya smiles and kisses him again, and Taiga follows him to the couch. It’s cold with the air conditioning on this high, or maybe that’s just an excuse to snuggle under the blanket but whatever. Taiga’s going to take it.


	105. aohimu, mai-chan

They buy an apartment in LA that they’re only ever going to use in the offseasons, but it’s not like they can’t afford it and it’s not like the condo has any strict policy about how many days out of the year you have to be there. And it’s as good an excuse as any for them both to go through their shit, throw out what they don’t need, and figure out what they’re going to take to reside permanently in Califormia.   
  
Obviously, Daiki’s collection of Mai-chan magazines and photo books are making the move. Obviously, according to Daiki, anyway.  
  
“Why do you have those?” Tatsuya says. “You know you can get the same things—and videos—online for free, right?”   
  
“I like having a physical copy,” says Daiki.  
  
“You bought those in high school,” says Tatsuya. “Do you even get off to them anymore?”  
  
Daiki shrugs. It’s hard to put it into words, but he’s had these magazines for a long time. Sure, when you say it like that, like they’re just things he’d jerked off to in high school, that’s a little bit sleazy and there’s no reason to build a spank bank archive or be reminded of being fifteen and lonely again, but he’s always had them.   
  
“Are you jealous?” says Daiki.  
  
Tatsuya snorts. “Yeah, I’m jealous of a gravure idol.”  
  
“I’ll let you watch me get off to them,” says Daiki.   
  
“No thanks,” says Tatsuya. “I’d rather actually have sex with you.”  
  
Daiki sighs. If that’s not the point, then what is it?   
  
“Please just keep them here if you’re going to keep them,” says Tatsuya.  
  
Daiki shrugs, trying to think about the week they’d spent cleaning Tatsuya’s apartment in New York, all the clutter they’d cleared away leaving them with not very much at all to stick in the back of Tatsuya's SUV on the drive across the country. There hand’t been anything like this; if there had Daiki wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Maybe the closest thing is, like, some of Tatsuya’s sex toys that Daiki doesn’t want to use himself, but Tatsuya hadn’t even looked like he was considering bringing those with him. But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s not like he’s sharing Mai-chan with Tatsuya (that would be hot but, no).   
  
“Okay, they’re staying here,” says Daiki. “What was that about actually having sex, though?”  
  
“Well,” says Tatsuya, stepping a little bit closer and tugging Daiki away from the stack of magazines.


	106. aokise, not there yet

“You’re not there yet,” Aomine says.  
  
Kise pouts, even though it’s true; even though he can copy anything but the other starters’ moves he still wants to be on Aomine’s level already. Soccer had been easy, swimming and tennis laughably so, but basketball is hard. There’s a steep learning curve, the jagged edge of the mountain and Kise has no one to copy to figure out how to climb it. He can only grasp at a little more every day, slowly think less and less about the day when basketball will fail to interest him.   
  
“Keep trying,” says Aomine, dribbling a ball between his legs, and Kise watches him, fast across the court, the relaxed posture, the easy moves like it’s easier for him tow alk with a basketball in his hands than without, like he was born to do this.  
  
Kise’s not as optimistic as he pretends to be, but it’s hard for him to take this badly. Even though basketball is a challenge and even though it seems like Aomine’s growing faster than he is with less room at the top for growth, Aomine’s still letting Kise face off against him. They still have their one on ones; Aomine says he’s not good enough, not there, but it’s not yet. Because he will be, and Aomine’s already recognized that, his potential, the place they’ll someday meet. The time when Kise won’t be looking up at him and when it won’t be weird to confess his crush, like he won’t be coming into anything (if anything happens, but from the way Aomine looks at him—if it’s still anywhere close to that in this future, then something ought to) with a disadvantage, like the scales are uneven.   
  
It still seems far off, though, like when he was a kid and his older sisters got to stay out late and go places with their friends he wasn’t allowed to because he had to be home for dinner and in bed early and it had seemed like he’d never be old enough, or that the goalposts would keep moving because his sisters always got to do and be more. But it’s not that bad, and even Kise’s learned a little patience along the way, patience and work. Just waiting won’t do shit; the only thing that will bring him closer is work. Effort, as much as he hates to show it. But Kise wants this badly enough.


	107. haikise, gossip girl au

They are each other’s bad habits, the imported cherry cigarettes Shougo steals from his mom’s bureau, the alcohol Ryouta nabs from his parents’ liquor cabinet and blames one of his sisters or the other parent depending on who he’s talking to, if it’s one of the rare situations when his parents care. Shougo hopping the turnstiles even though he can afford a cab as easily as he can afford a subway ride; he just likes the challenge; Ryouta maxing out his credit cards at fashion shows for clothes that can barely fit in his walk in closet and that he’s probably never going to wear he has so goddamn many already. The party where Shougo just barely fits the dress code and Ryouta’s in the middle of the room on his third drink charming everyone’s ass off until Shougo’s had enough and drags him off to give him a blow job in the bathroom, scraping his teeth against the skin of Ryouta’s teeth and then reminding himself no guts no glory and giving Ryouta a giant hickey right there.  
  
“I wish you wouldn't do that," Ryouta says, staring in the mirror and reapplying his mascara.   
  
“Price you gotta pay for a bj like that,” says Shougo. “You keep taking it.”  
  
“I keep hoping you won’t,” says Ryouta. “But you never learn.”  
  
“Obviously,” says Shougo. “I’m still here, right?”  
  
They’re interrupted by a middle-aged man, some kind of important (but not as important as Ryouta’s parents, probably), drunk off his ass and staggering towards the urinal to take a leak. Ryouta jerks his head toward the door; Shougo follows to watch that ass in those pants (they should make all suits that tight, but only all of Ryouta’s) and to see if the bite’s making him walk funny (it’s not, no matter how much Shougo tries to convince himself that it just might be).   
  
He walks home alone, leaving early because he’s bored and RYouta’s too damn social, smoking a regular cigarette under the streetlights, a habit he maybe should kick but can’t be bothered to. And even if he could, would he want to? Shougo’s never been good at wanting what he should, ad doing what he should, so in that respect Ryouta’s just par for the course, another bad habit he’s too sunk into to break. A bad habit that’s become part of his routine, a tic, something he leans on, but only as much as Ryouta ever leans on him in return.


	108. murahimu, apartment hunting

They’ve been to five apartments today and Atsushi had tried to beg off the last one. It doesn’t matter to him; they’ve all looked fine. Enough space for both of them, for Tatsuya to fit all his crap (even if Atsushi makes him get rid of a lot of it he always finds a way to accumulate more and Atsushi’s not going to fight it that hard) and for a bed big enough for Atsushi to stretch out on and still have room for Tatsuya. And that’s all they really need, not a particular view or a kind of overhead light (is Tatsuya planning to stare out the window or at the ceiling all the time?) or a foyer that looks just as big in reality as it had on the floor plan.   
  
“We’re going to have to live here,” Tatsuya had said, and, well, yeah, but neither of them currently lives in an apartment that’s going to be featured in any design magazines and they’re both fine with that.  
  
Then again, at this point it’s better not to bring it up to Tatsuya, and to just get this last one over with.  
  
“This is the last one right,” Atsushi says.  
  
“Yes,” says Tatsuya. “It’ll be fun.”  
  
Yeah, until he picks it apart, but Atsushi’s not going to rehash the same argument they’d had earlier. At least this one’s only on the second floor, in a neighborhood Tatsuya seems to like. Atsushi wonders if he were going to bet on the relationship between time spent in the apartment and the firmer Tatsuya’s decision that they shouldn’t rent it will be, but that’s too much math. Too boring.  
  
It’s a nice apartment, just like the other five; Atsushi likes the even higher ceilings and he can tell Tatsuya sees that, too, and maybe that’s enough to convince him they’ll take it and that will be that. Of course it’s not; he has to peer into all the closets and frown about the space, turn on the lights and purse his lips looking out the living room window, which just shows what’s across the street, a couple of small shops and apartment buildings.   
  
They follow the realtor into the kitchen then, and Tatsuya practically lights up.  
  
With him it's not a blatant show of emotions, a wide kind of display; he’s not trying to show that he loves it but he’s not really hiding it, either, running his fingers over the top of the counter and staring up at the cabinets. Atsushi’s pretty sure that’s it, that if Tatsuya doesn’t like this he’s not going to like anything they ever look at.  
  
“We’ll put down a deposit,” says Atsushi.


	109. murahimu, hockey au

At this point, the mysticism surrounding the Caps’ shitty playoff performance, year in and year out, eight seed or winners of the fucking Presidents’ Trophy, is built up bigger than the actual experience. Annoying questions from the press, the expectation that despite what they do, they’re doomed to fail. It never felt that way this series, but they’re still gone in six games, the Senators pulling the rug out from under them, their goalie standing on his head the last two games and it feels like there still had to be something more they could have done but Atsushi also feels like he’s never put this much fucking effort into something related to hockey, let alone a loss like this.   
  
It’s like rock bottom when you give up one goal in a five-period hockey game and the loss snuffs you out. Everyone can put all the blame on Atsushi; he doesn’t give a fuck. He wants all of the Senators, all of the players on both teams left in the west, to just lose and die so that they can’t have the Cup, either. It’s not fucking fair (Tatsuya will say it's not supposed to be, that is if he can tlak without his voice breaking right now).   
  
Tatsuya is methodically doing his tie around his neck, pulling his cuffs down over his hands. It hurts for him, too, in the same way, losing; it had been so easy to recognize it in him the first time they’d met, someone else who can’t stand to lose. Because losing sucks; losing like this sucks even more, and there’s nothing they can do. They all want to get the fuck out of this locker room and its stink of losing, but they all want to stay, too, because once they’re gone the season shatters like a big hit on the glass, a freak accident only it’s reality and it happens fifteen times every playoffs. Once every playoffs to them.   
  
They’re looking to Tatsuya as the captain; Atsushi doesn’t read the papers but he knows they’ve talked about how his leadership might be The Problem, as if there’s only one. as if it’s not a game played by four lines, twenty-five people in the locker room who have to hold up their weight, and people who don’t know anything shouldn’t talk about it like they do. Atsushi places his hand on Tatsuya’s back, between his shoulder blades, and Tatsuya looks up. There’s the same kind of anger in his eyes, the same frustration.   
  
“Why can’t they just go away,” Atsushi mutters.  
  
Tatsuya’s lips lift at the corners, tired but like he understands perfectly.


	110. momoalex, moving in

Alex wants to kill Satsuki’s roommate. That happens a lot of the time, by virtue of her never emptying the dishwasher (Alex is pretty sure she does it more and she’s only over there a couple of times a week) and making Satsuki have to hassle her to pay the bills and that time she’d walked in on them having sex. But telling Satsuki that she has to move out because she’d promised her friend they could live together is pretty fucking rude and probably a violation of the lease in multiple ways.   
  
"I don't want to stay if she doesn’t want me around,” says Satsuki, but considering they’re a week out of the arrival of the roommate’s friend (seriously, Alex is going to murder her with her bare hands) and three out from the first of the month, the options aren’t that great.  
  
“You can stay with me,” Alex says, the idea coming into her mind too suddenly to actually consider the implications, that maybe that’s too serious right away, that she doesn’t mean it like that—but Satsuki smiles.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
“Sure,” says Alex, reaching out to smooth Satsuki’s hair back away from her face. “Let me know what you need to move.”  
  
The furniture would be useful for Satsuki’s new apartment except most of it’s cheap and shitty; the dresser had come with the apartment and all of the stuff in the living room and the kitchen belongs to Satsuki’s roommate. There’s really not that much to move, Satsuki’s clothes and linens mostly, and there aren’t too many of those. She travels light, and it’s only a few trips halfway across town before they have it all.  
  
Satsuki’s looking for apartments already, scouring the real estate section of the paper, typing criteria into different websites, looking for a place that’s cheap and livable, and preferably alone this time. It’s not like Satsuki’s bad to live with, though; it’s pretty nice being able to wake up next to her every morning, to have Satsuki kiss her before she puts on her glasses, to watch Satsuki pick an outfit out before she heads off to work. It’s like Alex wants to stay this way.  
  
“You don’t have to go,” Alex says, looking over Satsuki’s shoulder at the screen on her laptop. “Unless you want to.”  
  
Satsuki shuts the computer; her hand is still warm from the way it radiates heat as she squeezes Alex’s knee. “I don’t want to.”


	111. kagahimu, better things

“He should move on to bigger, better things,” says Tatsuya, and it comes off as more bitter than it should (he can accept it, really; they’ve reconciled and Taiga’s surpassed him and he has bigger steps to take now that he’s not still waiting for Tatsuya).  
  
“Don’t undersell yourself,” says Alex. “It doesn’t matter if you were the worst basketball player on the worst team in the world, he’d still want to watch you—which, by the way, you know you're far from.”  
  
“I know, but.”  
  
“But you’re important to him. I’m going to hang up on you if you keep this shit up.”  
  
*  
  
It doesn’t mean it’s not hard, though, to think about Taiga, Taiga who’s once again across the ocean, if only for a few more months. Once again, it’s Tatsuya left behind, left chasing him; he’d followed him here and he’ll follow him back. He’s in a lower league, a league that still has something to offer him but not much more to offer someone like Taiga, and it’s bitter to see that spelled out literally for him like this.   
  
It’s bitter, but he just has to work even harder, that’s all, and Taiga makes it difficult for him to not cut himself any slack.  
  
“You looked so good out there last night,” says Taiga, speaking softly. “Those inside shots, Tatsuya, wow.”  
  
Tatsuya smiles and doesn’t say anything about the guards that must be on Taiga’s team. “You shouldn’t stay up that late.”  
  
“You stay up for me,” says Taiga. “Besides, I want to. I want to see you, even if I can’t really. When are you coming home?”  
  
“Not soon enough.”  
  
“Hey,” says Taiga, like his voice wants to break. “Shit, I’m sorry.”  
  
“It’s okay,” says Tatsuya. “It’s just a few months.”  
  
(Just a few months before he’ll be able to see how much Taiga’s grown, the extra inches no longer just an addition on his high school’s stats page, but the very real way Tatsuya’s going to have to tilt his head up, the rings they both wear again that Taiga had confessed he never wants to take off, and it’s not like Tatsuya doesn’t feel the same. Just a few months, but it feels so unbearably long now, even when Tatsuya tells himself to stop being so damn dramatic.)  
  
“Yeah,” Taiga says.   
  
Tatsuya pictures him, sprawled out on the couch, the cuffs of his hoodie pulled down over his hands, the empty wrapper from a deli sandwich on the table in front of him. Soon. They’ll still fit together.


	112. murahimu, actors au

Himuro has a reputation for being one of the hardest-working actors in the business, always taking on too many projects and negotiating his way out of multiple exclusivity agreements, on TV networks and movie series. He’s everywhere, and he’s still got time to whore himself out on the press circuit, smiling at interviewers and their inane questions and getting on the cover of all the men’s magazines, made up and airbrushed to look like he hasn’t been awake for twenty hours out of twenty-four for the last three weeks.   
  
Except he looks just that pretty in person, too. In passing on the red carpet or at some awards show is one thing, but on set, before he even steps into the trailer he’s pretty and smiling and professional and Murasakibara wants to hate him. He bets Himuro’s the kind of person who’s always on the clock, who doesn’t know how to take his work home with him,w ho would be negotiating contracts on his phone during a date.   
  
(Why he’s thinking about a date, that’s not important, just an example. Or rather, it’s just an example until Himuro asks him for dinner after they’ve been working on the same few scenes together for a few days, after their chemistry’s been praised and Murasakibara has no idea what that has to do with anything.)  
  
He turns his phone off, but he’s definitely still on the clock, playing up that beautiful and mysterious persona, that poker face hiding whether he really wants to smile or he thinks Mruasakibara’s really not funny or interesting.  
  
“Why are you still being fake?” says Murasakibara. “Are you trying to stay in character?”  
  
“No,” says Himuro. “What makes you think this isn’t the real me?”  
  
And a straight shot like that, staring Murasakibara directly in the face, feels like more of the real thing than Murasakibara’s seen in total before now.  
  
“Please,” says Murasakibara. “No one’s actually like this. I’m a professional faker too, you know.”  
  
Himuro shrugs, and the subject is dropped like a piece of lettuce falling out of a badly-made sandwich. Still, that one glimpse had been so little and so much, enough to pique Murasakibara’s interest. Even if he doesn’t like the real Himuro much more than the fake Himuro, he wants to know who that guy is before he makes up his mind. He kisses Himuro before dropping him off at his building, and thinks, in that instant, maybe that’s a little bit more of him.


	113. akamayu, hell au

Mayuzumi’s pretty sure he’s died and gone to hell. There is no hell, maybe; that’s what they’re saying to him anyway, but isn’t that just the thing they’d tell you when you’ve ended up there? Besides, when everyone’s dead it’s kind of hard to trust any of them. None of this is as expected, and it’s irritating as fuck, like finally getting a room to yourself to write with your laptop right there only it’s out of juice and none of the outlets work. Okay, maybe that would be hell, but this kind of afterlife sure as fuck ain’t heaven, either.  
  
“You look put out,” says that slightly evil looking redhead who’s been following him around (apparently when he’s dead he’s still noticeable; maybe he has the stink of the recently deceased or something).   
  
“Why are you following me?” says Mayuzumi. “Are you some kind of demon?”  
  
The redhead smiles, like he’s about to open his mouth extra wide, unhinge his jaw and swallow Mayuzumi whole (where would he go, some second level of the afterlife? How many times can you be killed on top of being killed?).  
  
“I’m Akashi. I just wanted to say hello.”  
  
“Well, hello,” says Mayuzumi.   
  
“Not going to introduce yourself?” says Akashi.  
  
“I feel like you probably already know my name,” says Mayuzumi. "Why ask?”  
  
“Why indeed?” says Akashi, humming like he loves to extend common courtesy and etiquette to every stranger he meets.   
  
Mayuzumi sighs; a character like that would be awfully good in the last book he’d been trying to write, but of course he can’t finish that now. The half-done steaming pile of shit he’d hesitate to call a manuscript is on his laptop, the encrypted hard drive and password-protected file. The afterlife is getting more and more perverse by the second, and Mayuzumi does not like it. He’d better not have to stay here forever.  
  
“I’m sure I’ll see you," says Akashi, waving as he turns to walk away.  
  
Maybe he’s just lonely, lost in a place he’s not supposed to be. That’s rarely the explanation, though; he could be an asshole who had alienated everyone, even here, approaching Mayuzumi because Mayuzumi doesn’t know his reputation yet. Still, it wouldn’t be bad to be on the good side of a guy like that, to be able to alienate annoyingly nosy people by association.  
  
“Hey,” Mayuzumi says, and Akashi pauses. “I’m Mayuzumi.”  
  
(Don’t tell a demon your name, but Mayuzumi’s already in hell so it doesn’t matter that much.)


	114. murahimu, apocalypse au

Maybe Tatsuya’s other eye is always open, and that’s why he always hides it. He can see through the waterfall of hair over it at night, when they’re sleeping, wrapped up but never too tightly even in the cold. Never too tightly because they might have to move; they might have to get somewhere, defend themselves. Guns under their pillows and knives in their belt, the one around Tatsuya’s neck on the heavier chain, the switchblade Atsushi tucks into his hair like a large pin.   
  
It helps Atsushi sleep easier to think of that, anyway, and he needs his rest (it doesn’t make him sleep heavier, just drift off when he can, his body curled loosely around Tatsuya’s like a dry leaf, ready to offer the flimsiest form of protection, but still something, because if you can’t do shit when you’re sleeping you’re not going to survive out here).  
  
Tastuya loots a jar of pickles from a settlement, the remnants of a grocery store hoarded somewhere. Not much in the way of nutritional value, a worthless treat but something to stick in his mouth, something that tastes good, like the days when they didn’t have to do this, when they lived in an apartment and made money, fresh from the bank instead of tattered notes exchanged uneasily with people of dubious trustworthiness. When they’d had bank accounts and credit cards and locks on the doors that people respected, when there were some laws and there was some order. When the land was rich and fertile, before the bomb (it’s funny how their memories tend to skip over the years of nuclear panic, of going to the grocery store and wondering of something could come crashing through the roof, a bomb whose toxic radiation could kill them all one way or another, if the grocery store would still be there the next day, until the bomb had dropped and it had all fallen apart worse than they could have imagined).   
  
Tatsuya says sometimes that it does no good to reminisce, to wonder about what could have been. But there are so many empty spaces here, not much else to do but think. Think about what they could have had, the things they’d lost, what still remains, clutched and tattered in their arms, until it, too, will someday fall away. It does no good for the world but it does no harm and it does enough for them.


	115. kagahimu, mugs

The offseason means less pro basketball (even in Olympic or FIBA Worlds years), but it also means more of everything else, more of everything Taiga doesn’t get nearly enough of during the season, and everything is mostly time with Tatsuya. Waking up with him, smelling the back of his neck, looking across the kitchen table reading the newspaper on a Sunday morning and seeing him there. It means going to the beach with him, hot sand burning the soles of their feet, lying under an umbrella with drinks sweating from the cooler where the ice is already most of the way melted.   
  
There are other things, mostly as an accessory to Tatsuya, like waking up late (because he gets to wake up late with Tatsuya, linger in bed like they never do during the season because they both have practice or one of them has a flight at a ridiculously early hour, kiss him awake and whisper how amazing Tatsuya is right into his ear, no cell phone connection between them, dividing them, and even though Tatsuya believes him when he says it now—way more than he used to—Taiga still needs to say it because it’s true) and like spending time in their place in LA, because it’s theirs, because it’s full of shared things they don’t have during the season, like the bed they’d picked out together at Crate & Barrel (he will never get Alex to shut up about that) and the stupid lamp Tatsuya had bought at a thrift store, like the matching mugs Taiga serves their coffee in every morning.  
  
A few years back they’d done a charity event for kids, a basketball clinic attached to a food drive and a silent auction. The clinic was supposed to be a few hours but they’d ended up staying all day, giving the kids pointers and coaching them in opposite teams. The youth center that had organized the event had had the kids decorate mugs for them, painted in tempera approximations of their team colors; each kid had signed their name in paint, some big and sloppy and others neat, a few in cursive. Big enough to hold almost half a pot of coffee, thick enough to keep it warm.   
  
“We should go back there,” Taiga says, his hand on Tatsuya’s knee under the table.  
  
“Yeah,” says Tatsuya. “I’d like that. My team will kick your team’s ass again.”  
  
“We’ll see,” says Taiga.


	116. kagahimu, hockey au

Tatsuya works himself too hard, but that’s nothing new. He goes all out in the weight room, on the stationary bike; he’s always taken everything on the ice with him, given every hit his all, taken risks with his shots that only he had the audacity and the chops to get away with, because he would always fall right back onto the backcheck if his well-calculated gamble didn’t work (which still isn’t too often). Most of the guys are headed home after practice is dismissed, too beaten down by the long season and the road and time away from home; some of the younger kids stay back and practice shooting. Tatsuya’s doing suicides.  
  
Taiga watches from the boards, perched on the ones that separate the home bench from the ice, ignoring the one trainer who’s still out there. The kids have stopped in a group, three of them, to watch Tatsuya leg it out, and every so often they’ll call up a rookie who tries to keep up with Tatsuya on these. Not now, apparently.   
  
“We have a game tomorrow,” Taiga calls out.  
  
“Fuck you,” Tatsuya says, between breaths.  
  
He’s better at not pushing his own limits over, tipping them on the side like cows that all the kids from rural Canada talk about like why wouldn’t you think that’s really a thing? Tatsuya skates over, spraying snow at Taiga but barely hitting the bottoms of his skates, leaning back against the boards. The kids go back to their game; Taiga winds his arm around Tatsuya’s waist, pulls him in. Whether he wants to lean on Taiga or not, he’s going to; he doesn’t try to fight it.   
  
“Ready for a nap, huh?” says Taiga.   
  
“Mm.” Tatsuya bumps the end of his stick on Taiga’s knee. “Stay up late and watch the Avs, keep an eye on the division.”  
  
“Watching the game won’t make them lose,” says Taiga.  
  
“Observing something changes the outcome; isn’t that like, scientifically proven?”  
  
Taiga laughs, dismounting from the boards. They should hop back over and shoer, but the kids are about to leave and eh knows Tatsuya’s not going to leave without shooting a bucket of pucks into the net, and make sure the last five all go in at designated spots. Taiga’s not going to leave him to do it alone, though.  
  
“Last to twenty in buys groceries?” says Tatsuya.  
  
“You’re on.”  
  
They bump gloved fists.


	117. aohimu, security

Things are okay. Tatsuya would say they’re better than okay but he’s still not so sure they even are okay in the first place; he’s still afraid of jinxing them, of assuming and backing himself into a corner where he has to watch everything fall apart in realtime.   
  
“You worry too much,” says Taiga.  
  
“I don’t want a false sense of security,” says Tatsuya.  
  
He stares out Taiga’s window, the afternoon lake view, the gathering clouds. There’s no metaphor here; there’s just him and Daiki and a whole lot of physical distance that could so easily turn into emotional distance, a whole lot of pieces they haven’t given each other yet.  
  
“Look, Aomine’s crazy about you; you’re crazy about him, so just—enjoy it, you know? When you let yourself be happy, the two of you—I just want you to be that way all the time.”  
  
Tatsuya nods; Daiki always seems to find the hidden catches that make him let go despite himself, get caught up in the moment and grab at happiness like it’s his to take, only realizing afterwards that it might not be.   
  
“I know it’s hard,” says Taiga. “But you’re okay. I’ll kick his ass to the moon if he hurts you, anyway.”  
  
And he’s so fiercely protective, a joke that’s not a joke at all, a sentiment Tatsuya knows he means with all of himself. He smiles; if anyone’s going to do the hurting in this relationship it will probably be him, but—he doesn’t want that to happen. Not on any end of it.   
  
He has to give a little bit more of himself, and it’s difficult when he’s used to holding it close, when he tries to give it all to basketball and basketball turns away. But he thinks about Daiki, voice scratchy with sleep when they’re on the phone together, when Tatsuya’s waiting in an airport or in the back of a bar in another so-called city in the middle of nowhere watching hockey on TV and thinking about how much better even this would be if he had Daiki next to him, to catch his eye and make fun of the shitty commercials. There’s a certain way Daiki looks at him, from across the court, that had caught Tatsuya’s eye when he’d told himself this was all going to be a big fat mistake, but that’s a feeling he doesn’t want to be true.


	118. kagahimu, rookie of the year

Taiga tightens his tie around his neck; it’s just a couple of hours for the awards show itself but, if he wins rookie of the year he’s going to have to make a speech and he’s still not sure what he’s going to say. If he wins, which isn’t a sure thing, even though people keep telling him he’s the favorite (and even though he did have a pretty damn good year; it’s not like he’s the only one in his class who did).  
  
“I’m proud of you, Taiga,” Tatsuya says, coming up behind him.   
  
The hall in Tatsuya’s apartment is wide enough for both of them to fit, looking in the mirror, Tatsuya looking much more at home in his tux than Taiga feels.   
  
“I might not win—”  
  
“I’m proud of you just the same whether you win it or not,” says Tatsuya. “Awards are just a popularity contest.”  
  
“Like you’re not up for one.”  
  
Tatsuya shrugs, and while defensive player of the year is not as flashy as being named the top rookie, for someone only in his second year it’s pretty amazing, especially for a guard competing against huge forwards with twice the number of blocks (yeah, people say NBA defense sucks, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a bunch of players who are awfully good at it)—well, it’s not like Tatsuya doesn’t deserve it; it’s not like what Taiga sees him doing on the court doesn’t match up to those advanced defensive statistics everyone loves to trot out.  
  
*  
  
Tatsuya insists on buying champagne to celebrate Taiga’s win.   
  
“I thought you said awards were bullshit?” says Taiga.  
  
“Just because they are doesn’t mean you don’t deserve one,” says Tatsuya. “And you deserve an extra award for standing up there and owning it. I know how much you didn’t want to make a big speech.”  
  
“Well, I had some stuff to say,” says Taiga. “And I meant it. Thank you, for everything—it’s all on you that I’m here.”  
  
“No it isn’t,” says Tatsuya. “You probably would have found basketball anyway.”  
  
“Not like this,” says Taiga. “And it wouldn’t be the same without you.”  
  
He kisses all the champagne from Tatsuya’s lips, all the fizz and the buzz of alcohol, until Tatsuya’s lips are chapped and swollen and shaking with happy laughter against his.  
  
“I want to give you all the awards,” says Taiga, burying his face in Tatsuya’s neck. “Even if you think they’re bullshit, you deserve them.”


	119. kagahimu, olympic au

Somehow or other, they always end up on opposite sides of the court. Not in the all-star game, but even when they’re playing their hearts out it doesn’t count for much. But when it counts, when it’s all official, for more than bragging rights and footnotes, they find each other in different colors, defending different baskets.  
  
Rio, Tokyo, Paris, and back to Los Angeles, where everything had begun for them, where it still feels so weird playing as a visitor, only Tatsuya’s on the home team for once. It’s odd, coming into this dressing room, even though he’d talked about it for years, imagined himself up there with Kobe and Shaq and Fisher, but this isn’t the Lakers. It’s the fucking Olympics, where every four years Taiga and Tatsuya have squared off somewhere on the bracket, and Taiga and Japan have won twice. The last time the US team won, Tatsuya had been nearly a benchwarmer on the American squad, back in Rio when he was just a kid, a rising soon to be someone.   
  
He’s the captain now, the way Taiga’s the captain of Team Japan, leading them back into his old stomping ground. But if he wants a gold, he’s going to have to get past Tatsuya first.  
  
“I’m excited,” Taiga says, kissing the side of Tatsuya’s face. “And a little nervous.”  
  
“Why?” says Tatsuya, even though he knows the answer already. “Pretty sure you have my number on these things.”  
  
Taiga snorts into Tatsuya’s hair, kissing the shell of his ear, biting lightly on the lobe until Tatsuya laughs and pushes him up to look into his eyes. Taiga’s face is open, happy, as excited as he says he is, as his heartbeat thumping against Tatsuya’s chest when they’re pressed together says he is.   
  
“I am, too,” Tatsuya says. “I’m happy I get to play against you again.”  
  
(On a half-busted knee, took too long to sign a contract this offseason, but he’s still here; he’s still playing against Taiga, and both of them going all out is the only thing that really matters.)   
  
Taiga pushes back Tatsuya’s bangs to look at his face as a whole, eyes traveling up Tatsuya’s forehead, over both of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, before he leans down and kisses it, smiling so hard that Tatsuya’s powerless not to return it. And Tatsuya takes what he can get but he always wants more, and if there’s any sort of sympathetic higher power out there, he wills it to drag this moment out, just a little bit longer.


End file.
